Martin, P W --- "Cornell's Experience Running Online, Inter-school Law Courses An FAQ" [2005] LegEdDig 37; (2005) 14(1) Legal Education Digest 6

Cornell’s Experience Running Online, Inter-school Law Courses — An FAQ

P W Martin

[1993] LegEdDig 70; (2005) 14(1) Legal Education Digest 6

39 Law Teacher 1, 2005, pp 70–81

Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute (LII) first added a fully online course to its range of activities in 1996. The pedagogical, technical, and administrative structures developed for these courses have produced measurable gains for both students and schools — gains one might imagine propelling this model and variants to widespread acceptance. But major change comes slowly in professional education.

The LII’s quite different approach has prompted numerous questions — from regulators, potential institutional partners, prospective students, as well as those contemplating similar ventures. Admission to the practice of law in all fifty US states and the District of Columbia requires successful completion of a three-year graduate program leading to the JD degree. With but a single important exception, work for that degree must be begun and completed at one of the 187 law schools accredited by the American Bar Association (ABA).

Prior to 2002 how distance learning fitted within the ABA regulatory structure was a matter of controversy and confusion. That year, following a lengthy period of hearings and debate in which the LII courses figured prominently, the organisation approved distance learning as a substitute for classroom instruction but imposed tight limits. Under its revised accreditation rules, courses conducted primarily by distance methods can substitute for approximately 18 percent of the required classroom instruction.

What sort of courses has the LII offered and how? The LII’s first distance course, which ran for three years, was constructed within a seminar framework. It covered a narrow topic, had limited enrolment, and called on students to undertake independent research and writing projects that were shared for comment by the class. In 1999, rather than continuing to evolve that initial model further, the LII decided to pause a year in order to create a fresh pair of distance learning courses. One aim was to break free from the weekly ‘real time’ video conference sessions that were central to the original course but created enormous co-ordination problems.

The basic components of these second generation courses include: (1) digital readings; (2) scheduled progression through a sequence of topics paced by Web-based discussion and mandatory student submissions; (3) hypermedia presentation; (4) computer-based tutorials and exercises tightly integrated with the readings and presentation material; (5) asynchronous but paced teacher-student, student-student written discussion; (6) four short writing and problem-solving assignments submitted via the Net for teacher evaluation and feedback; and (7) an end-of-term exam for final evaluation of student performance.

What is the relationship between Cornell and other ‘participating’ law schools? From the outset the LII’s online courses have been offered to non-Cornell students through their schools rather than directly. A course is only available to students of law schools that have agreed to include it in their curricula.

Why should Cornell or any US law school offer a course to students of other institutions? Technology-enabled approaches to education that allow teacher and students to be separated in both space and time open a wide range of opportunities. That pursued by the LII’s courses is the possibility of assembling a class of sustainable size by enrolling students from multiple institutions. If a school is going to offer such a course, why not offer it directly to students rather than through other law schools? Nothing in the regulatory scheme of US legal education prevents students from acquiring credits toward the JD of their home institution for courses taken at another school. In nearly all cases, however, such credits represent substantial additional educational costs for the student.

Why has the LII adopted a totally asynchronous approach? Because the LII’s first generation distance learning course included a weekly video conference, it could not be fit completely within a single academic term. Does not this form of teaching demand much more teacher time? The short answer is that creating a full distance course of the sort the LII has offered does call for major authorial investment, in order of magnitude comparable to that required to complete a book or similar large-scale scholarly project.

For the presentation component why use audio rather than video? The reasons have seemed compelling. To begin, there is a stark cost-benefit advantage to audio. On the other side, the difference between media is huge. Video imposes several different types of added cost. Bandwidth is a totally separate matter. The streaming audio multimedia technology used in the LII courses operates reasonably over a dialup Internet connection. Finally, audio offers a much lower threshold to course authors. US law teachers tend to create in relative solitude.

How do you prevent students from slacking off until just before the exam? Face-to-face class meetings set a tempo and provide benchmarks for student progress through a course. Years of prior instruction in this pattern condition students to depend on class meetings for time management. Inevitably, students who must balance the demands of a single asynchronous law course against three or four other courses driven by class meetings face a powerful temptation to defer the ‘virtual’ work in favour of the ‘real’.

How have the students responded? At the conclusion of each LII course, students are urged to complete a detailed questionnaire. Response has been quite high. For this substantial majority of those responding the model worked as envisioned. Two features regularly draw close to unanimous student endorsement: (1) the interactive problems coming at the end of each topic, which allow students to assess their own level of comprehension immediately after completing the readings and online presentations, and (2) the four mastery exercises spaced at equal intervals through the term.

How well have the students performed? Coming from multiple schools, the students enrolled in these courses represent a greater range of language and analytic skills, work and life experience, and facility in doing ‘law student work’ than a teacher is likely to confront in a single school’s student body. Numerous factors inhibit both the creation and spread of inter-school courses in the LII model, notwithstanding the new space opened by the 2002 ABA accreditation rules. Creating and sustaining such a course requires serious institutional commitment rather than mere approval of individual faculty initiative.

While schools with these characteristics do compete with institutions of stronger reputation in the state and nation, they rarely fight for students with one another. Their size and location invariably limit the curricular offerings open to their students. Distance learning has awakened some of these schools to the possibility of course sharing. A faculty member at one institution who possesses the competence to teach a specialised course can, via distance technology, provide instruction to the students of one or more others. A consortium to foster inter-school course exchanges in this model has just this year been established under the aegis of the Centre for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction.