asynchronous

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It seems that every day, more schools are announcing that they will re-open either totally or mostly online in the Fall. If you’re still debating whether opening face-to-face in the Fall is safe, I recommend that you read this compelling essay by my colleague, Bill Widen. I live in a COVID hotspot in Miami, Florida, and fortunately, I had already been assigned to teach online. Unlike many of you who may find out about your school’s plans at the end of July, I’ve already been focusing on upping my online game.

Last week, in Part II of this series, I promised to summarize what I have learned from some of my readings from  Learning How to Learn, Small Teaching Online, and Online Learning and the Future of Legal Education. Alas, I haven’t even had time to look at them because I’ve been teaching two courses, watching webinars on teaching, and taking two online courses for my own non-legal certifications. But it wasn’t a waste of time because it allowed me to look at online learning from a student’s perspective. Next week, I’ll summarize the readings in the sources listed above, but this week, I’ll provide…

I blogged two weeks ago about whether we were teaching law students the wrong things, the wrong way, or both. I’ve been thinking about that as I design my asynchronous summer course on transactional lawyering while grading asset and stock purchase agreements drafted by the students in my spring advanced transactional course. I taught the spring students face to face, had them work in groups, required them to do a a negotiation either in person or online, and am grading them on both individual and group work as well as class participation. When I looked at drafts of their APAs and SPAs last week, I often reminded the students to go back to old PowerPoints or the reading because it seemed as though they missed certain concepts or maybe I went through them too quickly— I’m sure they did all of the reading (ha!).  Now, while designing my online course, I’m trying to marry the best of the in person processes with some of the flipped classroom techniques that worked (and tweaking what didn’t).

Unlike many naysayers, I have no doubt that students and lawyers can learn and work remotely. For the past nine years, I have participated as a…