Abstract
FOR EIGHT years Cornell's Legal Information Institute has offered online law courses to students at other US law schools. Using a paced asynchronous approach, with streaming audio linked to referenced Web materials, interactive problems, online discussion/ and a series of written exercises, the courses offer a successful model of how law schools can pool teaching resources and students to enrich curricula. This article reports on and explains the choices, challenges, student response, and educational outcomes of this ongoing experiment, organised around ten frequently asked questions. It also ventures some cautious conclusions about the near‐term prospects for distance learning in US legal education, noting both inhibiting forces, including importantly constraints imposed by accreditation rules, and recent grounds for optimism.
Highlights
Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute (LII) first added a fully online course to its range of activities in 1996.1 In the years following, its distance courses, offered to students at over a dozen other participating US law schools, have enrolled approximately 500 upper-class law students and exerted a liberalizing influence on law school accreditation standards dealing with distance education
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
While various forms of computer-mediated learning have achieved relatively high degrees of penetration in US law schools that has largely been in support of or as a supplement to conventional classroom-based teaching
Summary
That year, following a lengthy period of hearings and debate in which the LII courses figured prominently, the organization 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% of the required classroom instruction. They may not, be taken until after the first year of law study and at a rate of no more than one full course or the equivalent per term. 3 (As previously noted California does not restrict bar admission to graduates of ABA-accredited schools.) In five years Concord’s online student population has risen to over 1,400. Its existence and evident success have drawn attention to the promise of distance learning in law
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