A Distance Education Primer: Lessons from My Life as a Dot.edu Entrepreneur

• Publication year: 2004
• Citation: Vol. 6 No. 2004

Linda C. Fentiman⁰

I. Introduction

We stand at the threshold of a major change in legal education. Recognizing the extent to which law students and lawyers alike rely on the Internet in both their professional and personal lives, the American Bar Association ("ABA") has approved new standards for the J.D. curriculum which will greatly expand the opportunities for law students and lawyers to use the Internet to learn at a distance.¹ Under these standards, students can earn up to twelve law school credits through asynchronous² courses, by taking up to four credits a semester, after they have completed 28 credits (roughly the first year of law school).

To date, few law schools have taken the plunge into distance education, although a handful have gotten wet toes. As the Director of the Health Law and Policy Program at Pace University Law School, I had the chance to swim in the deep end. I spent a two-year odyssey as a dot.edu entrepreneur, working with a group of dedicated colleagues to develop a distance learning initiative in health law.³ The Pace program was completely asynchronous, available via the Internet to lawyers, health care professionals, and law students, anytime of the day or night, anywhere the student had access to a computer and an Internet connection. In 2001, we launched the Pace Health Law Distance Education Program, beginning with two health law courses. The first course, Introduction to Health Law, provided a broad overview of the health law field. The second, Health Care Fraud and Abuse, offered an in-depth look at that important aspect of health law.

Although the initial results of the program were quite promising, after less than a year in operation the decision was made to suspend the program because it did not immediately break even, and its pursuit was not viewed as central to the Law School's mission. While recognizing that academic leaders must make tough decisions in light of their institutional mission, I believe that this decision was short-sighted. In the long run, innovative distance learning programs can be both popular and profitable, as they provide an important complement to traditional law school courses by permitting students to take specialized courses not normally available in law schools.

Through my experience in developing Pace's innovative distance education program, I have learned some critical lessons about the potential and perils of providing legal education via the Internet. In the belief that my experiences are generic, not dependent on a particular law school's context, I offer these observations to assist others who seek to launch distance education initiatives in the not-for-profit sector. The following is an account of my life as an educational entrepreneur.

II. It Began with a Dream

In 1987 Pace University Law School⁴ established a certificate program in Health Law and Policy,⁵ becoming one of the first law schools in the nation to recognize health law's importance as an area of specialization.⁶ By the time I joined the Law School faculty in 1995, the Health Law and Policy Program at Pace was attracting numerous students who were interested in health law as part of their J.D. degree. The Program also attracted practicing attorneys who were interested in making a transition from life as a corporate lawyer, real estate lawyer, or litigator to the specialty of health care law via Pace's certificate program. Most of these attorneys lived or worked in Westchester County, where Pace is located, just north of New York City. In my work, I frequently encountered lawyers from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut who said they would like to earn the Certificate in Health Law and Policy if it did not involve traveling to the Pace campus.

Thus the idea was born to offer the certificate in Health Law and Policy via distance education to the growing number of health care lawyers and potential health lawyers in the greater New York Metropolitan area. Initially, this appeared easy. Pace University, with six campuses flung across forty-four miles in New York City and Westchester County, had recently invested heavily in magnificent videoconferencing rooms, which linked the campuses. It was a no-brainer, I thought, to teach health law courses to our J.D. students and simultaneously make them available through videoconferencing to lawyers from Manhattan and northern Westchester County. This would permit us to serve lawyers interested in making a career change as well as those already practicing health law who wanted to expand their expertise. At virtually no cost, I fantasized, we could provide quality continuing legal education, double our course enrollment, and bring in tuition revenues that would permit Pace to hire more faculty and enhance the law school's reputation in the rapidly growing health law specialization. Dollar signs danced in my head.

Alas, I had not reckoned with the complexities of university administration. The law school class schedule did not mesh with those of other schools in the university, which were all competing for the videoconferencing rooms. While the law school offered three-credit classes on Mondays from 6:00 to 7:15 p.m. and Wednesdays from 8:00 to 9:15 p.m., other parts of the university taught in larger, three-hour blocks one night a week. Since the law school would not be permitted to monopolize the videoconferencing rooms, we could not meet our regular class schedule and still offer health law courses via videoconferencing to working professionals. We also could not change the times at which health law courses were offered without interfering with our students' overall law school schedules. Chastened but not deterred by these scheduling realities, it was time to consider other options.

Plan B appeared in the guise of the Learning Anywhere Anytime Partnership, a grant program sponsored by the Fund for Post Secondary Education ("FIPSE"), part of the United States Department of Education. In 1999, FIPSE announced this competition, open to nonprofit organizations seeking to demonstrate that distance education could satisfy unmet needs in a cost-effective manner. Applicants were required to have a partner, satisfying the widely held view of grant makers that grantees should work collaboratively to benefit from each other's insights and share limited philanthropic resources, developing programs that could be successful in multiple settings.

Fortunately, Teachers College-Columbia University ("TC"), one of the nation's premier graduate schools of education, had begun offering online courses in 1998. The Distance Learning Project at Teachers College was interested in partnering with us to explore how Pace could transfer its certificate program in health law to the Internet. Pace could learn from TC how to develop a "course delivery" structure appropriate for the complex area of health law. Pace and TC submitted a joint proposal to FIPSE that utilized Pace's "content expertise," Internet-speak for Pace's substantive knowledge of health law, and TC's pedagogical and technological expertise in distance education. We were jubilant when our proposal made the first cut of the FIPSE approval process, but ultimately we did not receive funding.

Nonetheless, writing the grant proposal clarified my thinking about how the Law School might develop online health law courses. There were two complementary goals for a health law distance education program: to enhance the Law School's reputation in health law, and to attract additional students to Pace, which in turn could provide increased resources for the Health Law and Policy Program. Our prospective students included both lawyers interested in health law as well as health care professionals who were confused and challenged by the complex system of health care regulation and payment that has emerged over the last decade, as managed care has changed forever the way that health care is provided and financed.⁷

In order to secure funding for a health law distance education initiative, I enlisted the support of Pace's Health Law Advisory Board, a group of distinguished health lawyers and health care professionals and administrators in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. We embarked upon development activities with the health law bar in the metropolitan New York area, seeking financial support from prominent health care lawyers.

The response to this initiative was mixed. Although there was much enthusiasm about the distance learning initiative, few firms were prepared to contribute financially. In the New York metropolitan area, with more than one hundred hospitals and many more nursing homes,⁸ there were ample opportunities for health law firms to buy tickets to hospital charity balls and golf tournaments, which had a clear and immediate payback in client cultivation. Although we received generous gifts from some members of the Health Law Advisory Board, we did not receive significant financial support from the health law bar at large.

Happily, however, in early 2000, the Law School found itself with an unexpected budget surplus, and the dean committed $90,000 to fund the Pace Health Law Distance Education Program. According to the budget that we had developed for our fund-raising efforts, this was enough to jump start our program, to permit us to develop and deliver health law courses, as well as pay for a modest marketing initiative. My life as a dot.edu entrepreneur was about to begin.

III. Learning to Think Like a Marketer

In the spring of 2000, we began interviewing research and marketing firms. Our objectives were to determine if there was indeed a market for health law courses offered via the Internet, and if so, to learn about that market's characteristics in order to tailor our courses and our marketing to reach that target audience. Only one of the higher education research and marketing firms who made presentations impressed us as Internet-savvy, with substantial experience in website development...