Online & Hybrid Learning: Toward Defining Best Practices in Legal Education (Sept. 30-Oct. 2, 2021)

Building on the overwhelming success of the 2019 conference, the biannual Online & Hybrid Learning Conference returns in 2021. The COVID-19 crisis proved a powerful accelerant of the trends that were identified at the 2019 conference, and much has been learned in the process. This conference seeks to bring together research derived from the Emergency Remote Teaching phase (Mid-March to June, 2020) and the more measured and planned Academic Year 2020-21, and use the data to identify emerging best practices.

Distance education and other modern learning tools are at work in legal education and have now been applied across a broad sampling of schools. Outcomes-oriented design, integrated formative and summative assessment, online simulations, asynchronous learning, and other hallmarks of distance education have demonstrated efficacy in law teaching for 20 years (though a robust empirical research agenda has yet to develop). The interesting questions continue to center around how and where these modern learning tools and disciplines can be used to best advantage in the law school curriculum. Expertise now abounds among the academy, and this conference aims to collect and share it.

Suggested topics include (but are not limited to):

• Evidence-Based Pedagogy in Online or Hybrid Teaching Environments
• Pedagogy in Practice
• Instructional Design – What We’ve Learned by Working with ID
• Achieving Professional Identity Formation Outcomes via Online and Hybrid Teaching
• Using Assessment Data in Evolving Online and Hybrid Teaching Environments
• Making our Hybrid and Online learning Environments Inclusive and Supportive of all Students
• Which Parts Go Where: Design Thinking Applied to Hybrid Legal Education
• Micro-credentials and Stacking of Credentials - Developing Program Outcomes
• Permeability of the Bricks and Mortar Building; Beyond Traditional Thinking
• What Student Can Tell Us -- Now

If you’re interested in presenting, please send a one-to-two-page proposal to David Thomson, John C. Dwan Professor for Online Learning, University of Denver, 2255 E. Evans Avenue, Denver, Colorado 80208 ([email protected]) in Microsoft Word (or the equivalent). The deadline for proposals is Monday, March 22, 2021.