Tag: law school

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New Paper From Indiana U Law Faculty Shows Significant Law Student Satisfaction With Online Classes

This is the first article to provide empirical data on the effectiveness of distance education in law schools since the ABA this summer approved increasing the total number of credits that law students could earn through online classes from 15 to 30. Our data, composed of law student surveys and focus groups, reveal not only the success of distance education in their experience, but also the methods that are most effective for them.

— Dutton, Yvonne and Ryznar, Margaret and Long, Kayleigh, Assessing Online Learning in Law Schools: Students Say Online Classes Deliver (October 1, 2018). Denver University Law Review, Forthcoming; Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law Research Paper 2018-13. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3242824

This article is important for 2 reasons. First, it provides an excellent survey of the state of online education in American law schools including information on what schools are providing online courses (hint: lots) and how those courses are being taught. Second, it provides solid empirical evidence of the success of online classes in an ABA accredited law school with the course being taught within the scope of the accreditation rules.

This is a must read for law school Deans, faculty, librarians, and technologists.

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Future of Independent Law Schools Is in Peril | New York Law Journal

It’s hard out there for an independent law school.
The number of law campuses that aren’t attached to larger universities is slowly dwindling amid closures and mergers, and several stand-alone campuses are fighting for survival. The seven-year downturn in legal education, which appears to be coming to an end, hit independent law schools especially hard because they can’t tap into university funds to tide them over in lean times. Many independent law schools also experienced sharper enrollment declines than their university-affiliated counterparts.

Future of Independent Law Schools Is in Peril | New York Law Journal

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ArXiv preprint server plans multimillion-dollar overhaul

A multimillion-dollar funding drive is being readied to transform arXiv, the vastly popular repository to which physicists, computer scientists and math­ematicians flock to share their research preprints openly.
But the results of an enormous user survey published this week suggest that researchers are wary of drastic changes to a site that has become an essential part of the infrastructure of modern science.

Source: ArXiv preprint server plans multimillion-dollar overhaul

After the recent sale of SSRN to Thomson Reuters there was some discussion among law faculty about the possibility of launching a new service based on ArXiv or something like it. This article serves to remind us that such a project is feasible, but likely requires strong backing of a major law school or university.