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Effective Methods for Teaching Legal Writing Online
Abstract
Online learning, once thought of as impossible or ineffective, is becoming increasingly common. Corporations have widely adopted it, and the academy is starting to accept it as well. There are numerous college-level courses, and even a few law school classes, that are taught fully online. One law professor and former Dean has recently suggested that teaching more courses online might be one way to reign in the soaring costs of a legal education. Given this trend towards broader acceptance of online learning in the academy, it seems only a matter of time before some legal writing teachers will be asked to take on the task of teaching the course in a fully online environment. Although today most legal writing teachers actually offer many online components to their "ground" class, many of them might recoil at the thought of teaching fully online, believing that the special demands of a successful legal writing course would break down in a "distance learning" environment.But it can be done. This article describes how to adjust generally accepted LRW pedagogy and deliver it in an online environment. The article also describes and explains the myriad technologies that are currently available to deliver online content. It also includes results of some empirical research into the effectiveness of these methods in reaching the goals of the course.
Online instruction has great potential for accommodating the learning styles and preferences of Millennial law students, as well as for the effective teaching of legal research in the digital age. While integrating instructional technology into a face-to-face classroom legal research course is highly desirable and relatively easy, designing and teaching a purely distance or hybrid distance course provides some unique challenges as well as some distinct benefits for both instructors and students. This article will first evaluate individual instructional technologies independently of each other, since any of them could be used to supplement traditional face-to-face research instruction, whether formal or informal. Consideration will then be given to special problems of teaching a graded legal research course entirely or predominantly online. Legal research instruction presents some opportunities for experimentation and innovation with online learning techniques that may serve students better, accommodate the librarian’s technology skills and abilities and her time constraints, and inspire others at our law schools to follow suit.