CONNECTION IN AN AGE OF CONNECTIVITY: AN EVALUATION OF SYNCHRONOUS AND ASYNCHRONOUS LAW CLASSROOMS

Abstract

As the world was thrust into a global pandemic, legal education was forced to confront the evolution of technological teaching modalities. While these technological advances allowed legal education to prosper in the short-term emergency education situation, their continued use creates barriers between the student and teacher which diminishes a student’s ability to develop critical lawyering skills. Based on our own roles as professor and student, we agree that deviating from in-person education will have detrimental effects for teachers and students and will undermine the collaborative relationship of the classroom. Legal institutions have refined in-person teaching methods, such as the Socratic Method, as mechanisms to engage and enhance teacher-student relationships. This Article evaluates the merits of distance learning and includes a discussion of a variety of emerging synchronous and asynchronous models but cautions how the evolution of distance education will jeopardize the relationship between teachers and students. The authors conclude that student-teacher collaborative relationships are built on trust and are best achieved through an in-person, synchronous environment