Asynchronous, E-Learning in Legal Education: A Comparative Study

Abstract

The recent survey from Wolters Kluwer showed that only 14% of respondents were aggressively planning for online legal education, while 19% did not plan to ever offer online education, with the rest of the responses falling into the proceeding-with-caution category. The authors attribute two major factors to this state of affairs — first, the limited number of hours allowed for online courses by ABA; and second, the technological difficulties and the reluctance of professors to learn the technology necessary to offer online courses. In addition, what the report calls a “greater barrier over time” was the general “wide-scale perception that online education is worth less than on-campus education.”

The question of whether online, or e-learning, education is “worth less” than the traditional classroom experience has not been empirically tested, but remains a kind of folk wisdom among legal educators. There does not appear to be any data or empirical research on this question, probably because of the small number of asynchronous law e-learning courses and opportunities to study them. Perhaps the right question is not whether online legal education is better or worse; but simply how specific parts of the course compare to traditional law course experiences.

This goal of this article is to help fill the empirical gap and provide an overview of how one law school’s first completely asynchronous doctrinal course compares to “traditional” law courses.

Keywords: online legal education, law school, asynchronous

JEL Classification: K19