Student-oriented reflections on the coronavirus and online legal education

I’ve read a few pieces here and there about online education (particularly online legal education) in the abrupt transition due to the coronavirus. But these often, in my view, feel unusually professor-centric, including reflections on how the students have reacted to the professor’s online experience (e.g., describing the experience as particularly “intimate” in the eyes of the professor). In my view, there are a number of significant barriers facing many students in an online environment that I’m trying to puzzle through in the event the fall term continues to drive us online. (I’ve seen some of these laid out elsewhere, so I hardly want to claim they’re novel—but I do believe they merit more emphasis than many of the takes I’ve seen.)

Access to reliable high-speed Internet. This is assuredly the largest problem students face. I’d venture to say that a quarter of my students don’t have good Internet access. Being able to participate live requires reliable high-speed Internet access. Understandably, this has been a priority of the FCC in recent years, particularly rolling out more reliable Internet to rural communities. But cities need to provide better opportunities for Internet service providers—more competition, subsidizing upgrades, whatever it might be—to make this possible. It is a dramatic barrier for many students who have to watch asynchronously, when they get a chance to find a place to download a lecture or to download it over a few hours. Indeed, I couldn’t stream from my home because the Internet is so poor, a reason I’ve had to use the law school (deemed “essential” to continue education continuity).

Streaming and note-taking simultaneously, and laptop hardware. Another challenge is the set-up for students while note-taking. Most students can take notes on a laptop while looking at the instructor or classmates in class. Now, students are trying to use the same screen for both watching the lecture and note-taking. Small laptops screens make this poor. Worse, many student-advertised laptops are optimized for low resource uses, like note-taking, not high resource uses, like streaming video. Zoom is not as resource-intensive as, say, video gaming, but it does require more effort and increases chances of lagging and crashing. If students have a second monitor—or a second computer—they are much more likely to enjoy streaming and note-taking separately.

Study spaces. Campus housing and libraries are tremendous resources for many students. It provides places away from home to live, study, and work. Without those spaces, students have had to compete for resources in the close confines of life with parents, siblings, and others living at home. Even with good Internet, they may not have the space or time to participate in synchronous classes.

Home life matters. Relatedly, it’s not that the coronavirus is draining resources from students focusing on that illness (at least, not for the majority of them). Instead, it’s that, once students return home, there are many new challenges that home life invites. There are the obvious disruptions, like child care. But, say, routine matters of family health—when living at home, you’re inclined to help out with a parent’s doctor’s appointment, whereas when living in a dorm hundreds of miles away, you couldn’t do so. For many students, school simply looks different when thrust into the ordinary every day of home life.

Now, for those students who remained living in, say, an off-campus apartment, with reliable Internet and multiple computer monitors, with a significant other or alone or a reliable roommate, life may look little different.

And even with such challenges, students are undoubtedly doing their best. I’ve done an okay job checking in with them. I should do better in the year ahead.

But I think schools need to be thinking about how to handle these myriad complications facing students in future iterations of online education. Yes, while online education often exists elsewhere and it’s hardly new, students doing so often (1) deliberately opted into ex ante, not mid-degree or involuntarily; (2) relied upon an existing support infrastructure, including child care and housing arrangements; and (3) used particular Internet and computer resources ahead of joining the class. Schools would do well to consider how to tackle these challenges in the months ahead.