Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Education Innovation

Law Schools Are Going Online to Reach New Students

Law schools, in the face of marked declines in enrollment, revenue and jobs for graduates, are beginning to adopt innovative new ways of delivering legal education.

Some law schools are moving away from relying solely on classic settings and instead are blending classroom learning with online instruction, said Michael B. Horn, a founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute, a research institution in San Mateo, Calif.,

that explores disruptive innovation in education.

“Legal education is confronting the most imminent threat in higher education,” Mr. Horn said. “Law schools are increasingly out of step with shifts in the legal services market.”

Law schools that “are able to pioneer online, competency-based programs that focus outside of the traditional J.D. will have a leg up in the struggle to survive,” said Mr. Horn, an author of the newly released report, “Disrupting Law School: How Disruptive Innovation Will Revolutionize the Legal World.”

Mitchell Hamline School of Law, in St. Paul; Washington University School of Law, in St. Louis; and Syracuse University College of Law, in New York, all offer programs that fuse some elements of traditional legal education with technology in new educational vehicles. Harvard Law School also offers an online class on copyright law to its on-campus students and to students who can enroll for the free, not-for-credit course from anywhere in the world.

Opportunities to earn a full-fledged law degree online are few, so far. The William Mitchell College of Law began offering a hybrid law degree in January 2015. The school has since merged with Hamline University School of Law.

“We saw that there was a need for a national degree that could be available to students who are not able to move elsewhere to study for their law degree,” said Gregory M. Duhl, the assistant dean overseeing the Mitchell Hamline program. In addition to online courses, the curriculum, which takes about four years to complete, requires roughly 10 campus visits for workshops on legal skills.

The program attracts students like Brian P. Kennedy, 60, president and chief executive of the El Paso Sports Commission, which manages the city’s 6,500-seat colosseum. He said he had enrolled because not earning a law degree was “my only regret.”

He was accepted to the law school in 1982 but was sidetracked by his career in the music and entertainment industry. He said he hoped to become an entertainment lawyer but added that the periodic campus workshops have persuaded him that “litigation is also in my future.”

Syracuse’s law school adopted a somewhat different approach when it announced in April that it would offer a hybrid law degree once it received approval from New York State and the American Bar Association, which regulates accredited law schools. Syracuse is working with 2U Inc., an education technology provider in Landover, Md., that has collaborated with some major universities, including Northwestern and Georgetown. The online degree program would use 2U’s platform.

The program will be for people whose work or family obligations prevent them from attending a residential law program. It will offer live online classes with Syracuse Law faculty members who will interact with students. The program, which is expected to begin in 18 months, will also include courses on campus and internships with outside employers.

Like those of other law schools, Syracuse’s student body has shrunk; it is down about one-third in the last decade.

The online program, which would require students to be on campus once or twice a year, is expected to attract 40 to 50 students initially, said William C. Banks, interim dean of the Syracuse law school. Once the program is established, it could enroll as many as 300 students a year, according to the law school.

It would split the proceeds with 2U, whose founder, Chip Paucek, said that his company planned to invest at least $10 million in the project over four years.

“It is not only expensive but it’s complicated to create a completely interactive system, with 24/7 online support,” he said.

The company already has a record, having collaborated with Washington University School of Law, which began offering online classes for a master of laws degree in January 2013. Since then, the program has drawn students from dozens of countries, including China, Mexico and India, who opted for a course that did not require them to be present on the St. Louis campus.

More than 350 students have enrolled, and 98 students have graduated from the master of laws program, according to school figures.

Students, most of whom attend part time, sign in at specific times each week for online classes and can interact with the instructor and fellow students from wherever they are in the world.

“Many classes are at 7 a.m., which is 8 p.m. in China, or on Saturdays,” said Michael H. Koby, associate dean of international graduate programs. The program is aimed at students who want some background in the law but do not necessarily need a three-year law degree, he said.

The program is “as rigorous as the on-campus program” and offers the intimacy of the classroom, he said. The tuition, about $2,200 a credit, is the same as for on-campus students.

Another way of delivering legal education is through online certificates in specific legal areas. Widener University Delaware Law School, for example, offers a certificate in education compliance, said Rodney A. Smolla, the school’s dean. The school is exploring more distance learning, relying on its own resources for technology and instruction.

“Law schools are about to make that turn,” he said of online offerings. “It’s a blend of being hipper and of economic necessity.”

But Mr. Smolla acknowledged that law schools have been slow to try new approaches. “We are a conservative profession,” he said. “We tend to want to teach law in the way we learned it.”

Sticking to the traditional hampers innovation, warned Deborah J. Merritt, a professor at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law who tracks such developments.

Educators creating online courses, she said, “tend to replicate conventional courses online, delivering the same content to familiar audiences.”

While this may increase options for interested audiences, she said, “it is unlikely to expand the pool of students benefiting from our expertise.” The costs of creating, maintaining and updating high-quality online courses are so high, she added, that they could prove more expensive than campus classes.

To attract new and broader audiences, she advised law schools to categorize offerings by subject matter rather than by course or by degree program. One example is a copyright law course developed in conjunction with Harvard Law School. In addition to law students, roughly 500 other people have been attracted to the online course, which is offered in the spring semester and was developed by Harvard using existing technology.

The course allows both categories of students to interact via weekly webcasts featuring guest speakers and an online discussion forum, according to Prof. William W. Fisher, known as Terry, who teaches the course, which is also licensed to 18 universities worldwide to generate revenue.

Harvard offers another, moneymaking model with an online certificate course in business basics created by its business school. The course is available to Harvard Law students for roughly $300, but other students must pay $1,800.

This kind of program can be a model for law schools to expand their reach, Ms. Merritt said. But, she said that “to justify the costs of online education, law schools need to think big.”

She said that means creating courses that “reach out to broader audiences who may also want to learn critical thinking skills and about legal principles.”

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT