A rapid transition from brick-and-mortar teaching approaches to online instruction has been spoken of for years within the EdTech community as if it were “just around the corner.” But the shift has been slower to take root than commentators have imagined it would or should be. From my observation, the tipping point to online education has been just three years away . . . for twenty years now. Will it continue to be like this for the foreseeable future? Or has its time finally come?
Outside of the law school space there are signs that a transition is now well underway. According to a report by the Babson Survey Research Group, more than 30% of all higher education students in the U.S. (around 6.3 million) now take at least one distance education course. And while online education does have its skeptics, there’s a growing body of research and anecdotal evidence that suggests that, properly managed and contextualized, online education can be successful and educationally effective. A review published by the U.S. Department of Education found that students in online conditions performed modestly better, on average, than those learning the same material through traditional face-to-face instruction.
Law school, though, is something of an outlier in this regard. As yet, a relatively small number of law schools actively embrace online courses in their core J.D. programs. (There’s much more experimentation with online instruction in L.L.M. programs.) There are three main reasons for this.
First, J.D. programs are carefully regulated by the American Bar Association, which sets a limit to the number of courses J.D. students can take online. Because law school classrooms are traditionally built around highly interactive styles of Socratic debate, the ABA has traditionally had concerns that online education – which lacks the collocated interactivity of brick-and-mortar classrooms – dilutes the quality of learning.
Second, most law faculty themselves value the rich dialogue of a traditional classroom and agree that this is core to helping students learn to “think like a lawyer.” Thus any effort within a law school to push for more online education is likely to meet with some internal resistance.
Third, there have traditionally been few reliable providers of online legal instruction whom law schools could contract to fill this need. While there are a number of quite large companies that for many years have helped undergraduate institutions deliver and consume online instruction (including Pearson Online Learning Services, Wiley Education Services and Academic Partnerships), mostly they have not directed meaningful focus to the much-smaller law school market.
Lack of demand coupled with lack of supply, with regulatory restrictions added in: it’s certainly no wonder that online instruction has not swept through legal education.
But there are some signs that the moment has now come. For one thing, there are now multiple OPM (online program management) companies that are dedicating meaningful effort to helping law schools move into the online space. These include Barbri’s iLaw, which delivers a catalog of online courses to more than 40 law schools, and 2U, which recently announced the extension of its partnership with the Washington University School of Law to power its online L.L.M. degrees. For deans who are considering a move in this direction, the decision is made easier by knowing that there are companies with solutions ready-to-hand.
For another, the enrollment crisis of 2013 – 2017, which severely pressured the financial viability of many law schools, led to a greater consensus among deans and faculty on the need to actively explore alternative approaches to building their student body and magnifying their sources of revenue. Through online education, many deans now believe, law schools can reach students in geographically dispersed or difficult-to-target areas, non-traditional students who can’t attend day classes, students at other U.S. law schools looking to earn additional certificates, or even students in foreign countries. For example, both the University of Dayton School of Law and Syracuse University School of Law have recently launched hybrid online / brick-and-mortar ABA-accredited J.D. programs to capture these untapped students; while the Concord Law School (which has not sought ABA accreditation, but whose graduates are able to sit for the California Bar Exam) is trying to reach the same students with a fully online J.D. program.
And law students themselves are increasingly comfortable and even eager for online approaches to education to supplement their traditional classes. Most of today’s law students, after all, are “digital natives,” who have not only grown up with technology in every aspect of their private lives, but have spent on average hundreds of hours learning through technology-based educational solutions by the time they graduate from college. Thus deans and law school faculty are increasingly aware of the need to foster greater experimentation with technology-based instructional approaches if they wish to continue to seem highly relevant to future generations of law students.
Finally, the ABA is signaling a greater interest in allowing online education to be mixed in with traditional classroom education on the law school campus, having recently raised the maximum number of credit hours a law student can take online from fifteen hours to roughly thirty. Further expansions of regulatory boundaries seem likely in the coming years.
Yet for all this, the impact of online education in law schools is still nascent at best, and while it is growing, it’s doing so only gradually. Why? As one dean of a prominent law school put it to me in a note, “Law professors are inherently interested in what the law should be. Our goal is to teach students to think very deeply about matters of great moment to human society and human life. We recognize that technology has an important role to play in the future in education, but we undoubtedly will continue to believe in face-to-face debate and dialogue as the core of legal education for as long as law schools continue to exist.”
Still, adherents of online legal education argue that online education actually can address the traditional Socratic style as well as, or in their telling even better than, the brick-and-mortar approach. “In traditional classrooms,” says another law school dean and prominent leader in the online education space, “there can be many students who get overshadowed, for whatever reason. That’s much harder in online instruction. All students can connect directly with their instructors, or can voice their perspectives to their fellow learners without the scrutiny of peers in the same room watching them as they speak, and without any anxiety about bumping into those people later in the afternoon. If the tools of online education are properly used, it can be a very democratic space.”
The debate will go on, but it’s hard to believe that online education will not continue to grow as a viable option within law schools in coming years. There are simply too many macro-factors pushing towards that direction. As for when the tipping point will come when online education will be fully embraced by the legal academy? I feel I’m on safe ground in saying that it can be no more than three years away . . .
Vikram Savkar, Vice President and General Manager of International and Higher Education Markets
Vikram Savkar is Vice President and General Manager of International and Higher Education Markets at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S. He is responsible for managing operations of the market leading publisher of textbooks and other learning solutions for law schools in the United States and abroad, as well as the leading global provider of expert solutions in cross-border legal practice areas including intellectual property, cross-border tax, international arbitration, and competition law.
