The Underappreciated Benefits of Distance Law Teaching

Abstract

Higher education professors got a crash course in “distance education” during the Covid pandemic. This essay identifies and explores lessons about distance education we professors should─and should not─take away from our experiences teaching during the pandemic. I argue many of us learned lessons about distance education we now should unlearn, and we still need to learn essential lessons about distance education we did not learn during the pandemic. The benefits of well-designed distance education vastly exceed the obvious benefits of reduced commuting to and from campus. Professors who had little or no time to prepare for online teaching did not have an opportunity to develop engaging asynchronous course content for use in their online courses. As a result, for many professors, the “distance” part of distance education defaulted to synchronous Zoom class meetings that were virtual lecture classes.

Asynchronous course content offers many pedagogical benefits, but few professors learned that lesson during the pandemic. I was luckier than most professors because I had developed an online graduate tax course with asynchronous content before the pandemic. During the development of that course, I discovered that asynchronous course content is not synonymous with short video lectures and a flipped classroom. With the capable assistance of a technical learning designer, I learned that well-designed course content actively engages students, through creatively designed course modules, with feedback and formative assessment built into the learning process. The active learning fostered by asynchronous content can be better than the learning in face-to-face, lecture-based classes, which often are mostly passive experiences for students. Also, asynchronous work can include collaborative group projects, including problem solving and writing projects, which encourage student-to-student interactions that often are lacking in face-to-face classes. This essay provides samples of asynchronous content I created for an online graduate tax course, but later adapted during the pandemic for a first-year law school elective course, Introduction to Income Tax. Also, I discuss the intended and unintended consequences of using my online course materials in a traditional law school course.

Keywords: legal education; distance education; hybrid courses; Zoom; asynchronous content; learning design