Elements of Effective Online Instruction in Law

The Covid pandemic has had a significant impact on law school pedagogy, although how much that impact will remain and be a benefit post-pandemic remains to be seen. This article argues that we should leverage what we learned and use it to redesign our courses for a future world of hybrid teaching, so as not to lose what we gained by returning to in-person teaching as if nothing happened to us or our students. It offers suggestions about how to go about doing that—how to capture the benefits of what has been learned about online teaching in the 2020–21 Academic Year, and apply it to our teaching going forward. Among those suggestions is to redesign our courses from back to front, starting with articulating our learning outcomes and then developing modules designed to meet those outcomes, with formative assessment for each module as the semester progresses. It also suggests maximizing the precious in-person time we will regain post-pandemic by intentionally moving some of our content online, and deliberately choosing how to deliver that online content best. Doing these things deliberately will contribute to making us more effective teachers, and help our students become more effective learners—in law school, and in their future lives as practitioners.