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IU McKinney faculty and students have been ahead of the curve when it comes to online learning, even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic that caused a worldwide disruption higher education during the spring 2020 semester.

Over the past four years, the law school has made important investments in online teaching and learning, thanks to the efforts of IU McKinney faculty and the help of IU’s instructional designers. The online courses include required or highly recommended upper-level courses, specialty electives, and courses that are part of the law school’s eight graduate certificate programs.

Taught by award-winning faculty who now have, collectively, logged thousands of hours of course design and teaching experience, IU McKinney online offerings aren’t just an experiment—or an emergency.

Instead, IU McKinney is continuing to strengthen its commitment to offering courses that help students achieve the best educational and professional outcomes, according to Professor Max Huffman, the law school’s Director of Online Learning, pictured above.

“Our primary work at McKinney is to teach law students,” Professor Huffman says. “We’re really focused on responding to the changing needs and realities of the profession and student demand.”

The legal profession—like the rest of society—is much more global, with legal work often communicated at a distance with far-flung clients, or by email with supervisors who expect even beginning lawyers to work independently and online, Professor Huffman says.

For law students, online learning isn’t always a choice. Sometimes, due to professional or personal obligations, it is a necessity, he says. At a law school like IU McKinney, which has generations of alumni grateful for the opportunities offered through evening and part-time programs, providing online learning is a natural extension of that mission.

IU McKinney students in the JD program may take up to 30 hours of coursework online, subject to course availability. Graduate students in the MJ or LLM programs are permitted up to 11 credit hours (LLM) or 14 credit hours (MJ) online. New courses are being developed in an online format on an ongoing basis, and offerings are now available each year in the Summer, Fall, and Spring terms.

Students' decisions are not always based on need or convenience - sometimes, interest alone drives their decisions.  Those students frequently become converts to the different pedagogy.

As a McKinney student, Sam Szynal, ’20, took three online courses. “I primarily chose these courses for their subject matter—the fact that they were online did not weigh heavily into my decisions, although there is certainly a benefit in terms of convenience to asynchronous courses,” he said.

“All of these classes involved smaller, bite-sized assignments throughout the semester that required application of the material, whereas a traditional lecture-based class may only call for application on a final exam,” Szynal said. “I found that these smaller assignments in the online courses helped illustrate how certain rules build on each other and work together, which ultimately enabled me to better integrate and contextualize information. I always arrived at the end of an online class with information still ‘sticking’ from the entire semester rather than the feeling of needing to circle back and re-learn everything.”

Lectures may allow limited student-to-student and student-to-professor interaction in the classroom, but participants in live classes are more or less shooting from the hip, he added.

“In an online discussion board format, students and professors are able to compose their remarks more completely, which affords them the opportunity to better develop their thoughts and respond meaningfully and analytically to colleagues,” Szynal said. “I found that participating in this type of dialogue made me engage with points I had not considered and opened up my own ideas and analyses to constructive criticism.”

IU McKinney faculty have engaged in substantial research and scholarship in support of their online teaching. Professors Yvonne Dutton and Seema Mohapatra recently co-authored an article forthcoming in the St. Louis University Law Review in 2021 that provide practical examples from their own experiences with designing and delivering online courses with the help of IU resources. Other faculty, including Professors Margaret Ryznar and Max Huffman and Vice Dean Cynthia Adams have also published scholarship on online course design and pedagogy.

Professor Dutton says her own research is based on anonymous surveys and focus groups with students who had taken asynchronous (meaning that students and professors are learning online, but are not necessarily at the same time, or at prescribed times) classes at the law school in a pre-COVID-19 world. Based on that evidence, she is convinced that students desired more online offerings and that they viewed them as delivering a high-quality learning experience.

Dutton, like several other McKinney faculty, teaches online courses that that are designed in keeping with the Quality Matters Rubric for online course design, partnering with Ph.D.-level course designers at Indiana University’s Center for Teaching and Learning at IUPUI. McKinney faculty can take advantage of IUPUI’s campus recording studio for high-quality video, and custom templates created especially for the law school ensure that online students have a consistent experience as they navigate their courses.

“We do not suggest that online law classes are ‘better’ than live courses taught in the classroom,” Professor Dutton said. “We love teaching live and interacting with students. At the same time, we have designed and offered quality online asynchronous courses to accommodate student demand.”

In a Crisis, Experience Matters

Having experienced and dedicated faculty ready and able to pivot quickly to emergency remote learning was invaluable when all learning went online in March, Professor Huffman said.

"Having made our investment at a time when we could develop our experience without being on crisis footing, we were better prepared than many peers to meet the circumstances head-on,” he said.

Faculty adapted their courses, taped their remaining lectures for students to watch on their own time, and used Zoom for classes and to bring legal experts to speak to students.

In April, for example, Professor of Practice Janet McCabe invited former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Gina McCarthy to speak via Zoom to her environmental law class—an opportunity to interact with a top American environmental expert that likely could only have happened with distance learning technology.

When the COVID-19 crisis forced Clinical Professor of Law Cynthia Baker to teach “Legal Aspects of Government Finance” online, she was confronted with the choice of canceling a planned field trip to the construction site of the new Indianapolis Community Justice Campus or finding an alternative.

She worked with the project’s management team to do a virtual field trip, with the help of a drone camera and Zoom technology. The class could see the $600 million public investment in the city’s new approach to criminal justice and continue to examine its relevance as a case study of local government finance.

Professor Baker, who directs the IU McKinney Program on Law and State Government, also directs Experiential Learning at the law school, which has continued to offer externships and clinical experiences for students, with accommodations as pandemic conditions demand.

“We didn’t just throw up our hands. We kept learning. Our classes and experiential learning go forward,” she said. “That’s just how our profession has to respond. We’re prepared for online learning, just as we have to learn to practice law in this environment.”