Introduction

• Author: Rebecca Purdom - Greg Brandes - Karen Westwood
• Pages: 8-13

8

Chapter 1

Introduction

Collecting Challenges, Solutions, and Best

Practices for Deans, Faculty, and

Policymakers

There is little doubt that distance education is becoming one of the standard forms of instruction for

American students at all levels of teaching. The impact of distance approaches has already been

significant at the secondary level. Colleges are increasingly making distance offerings available, and

graduate programs, such as law, are in the early stages of following suit. Distance learning is not just the

province of for-profit and entry-level colleges; some of the nation’s most prestigious universities are

jumping on board. When the Working Group first met in 2011,

2

Stanford was already experimenting with

free, massive online courses, and MIT had just opened up virtually all of its instruction on a non-credit

basis in a free, online format it calls “open courseware”.

3

Over the years the Working Group has met, this

stream of developments has become a torrent. Stanford’s experiment has led to its own iTunes U channel

and helped to catalyze the formation of the for-profit outlet Coursera.

4

Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, and a

host of other institutions have countered with their own online education portal—EdX—offering free

courses from their catalogs.

5

MOOCs–Massive Open Online Courses–have come, made a splash, and then

been declared a failure by pop-culture and the blogosphere.

6

In the meantime, schools across the spectrum

have adopted online and distance learning as a guiding force in their pedagogy.

Several forces are driving these developments. Some are technical. The ubiquity of broadband Internet

access has created opportunities for new forms of instructional delivery, allowing distance learning to

move far beyond the “talking heads on the TV screen” history of such efforts as the University on the

2

This wo rkin g paper owes its existence to the collegiality and generousness of hundreds of participants in the Working Group

for Distance Learning in Legal Education (WGDLLE). In eight collaborative working sessions over three and a half years, these

colleagues gave openly of their expertise and time, to collect practices and tools, organize issues and their solutions, and prepare

this paper to share with the legal education community. The participants are literally too numerous to mention, but a partial list of

these individuals and their institutions is in Appendices H and I.

3

See http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

4

(“Take the world’s best courses online, for free” – see https://www.coursera.org/).

5

See https://www.edx.org/.

6

Dan Friedman, The MOOC Revolution That Wasn’t, TechCrunch, (Sept. 11, 2014), http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/11/the-

mooc-revolution-that-wasn’t.