Here is an interesting article from The Chronicle of Higher
Education regarding the Concord (on-line) law school.

Leslie McKesson
Western Piedmont Community College
Morganton, NC

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Tuesday, January 4, 2000

Founder of Online Law School Says It Has Advantages Over
Classroom Instruction

By SARAH CARR



Concord University School of Law, the first all-online law
school, has aroused strong opinions and emotions since it
opened a little more than a year ago. Supreme Court Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg weighed in last September, saying she was
"uneasy about classes in which students learn entirely from
home." But Concord's dean, Jack R. Goetz, stands behind his
vision. The school, which is not accredited by the American
Bar Association, is a division of Kaplan Educational Centers
Inc., the test-preparation company, which in turn is owned by
the Washington Post Company.



Q. How did you become involved with Concord?
A. The idea for Concord University came from me, actually. I
presented the idea to Kaplan Educational Centers in December
of 1997. It had been the culmination of 20 years that I spent
in legal education, trying to understand why people who would
want to attend law school have been closed out of the
fixed-facility system.

Concord's mission is primarily to provide accessibility for
legal education to mid-career persons who are well established
already in life, but are looking perhaps for a change in
scenery in their job. Or maybe they are looking to enhance
their own careers with a legal background and the skills that
come from studying law. Or they could be people who were
geographically or otherwise prevented from attending a
traditional law school. If you look at the way law schools
demographically are situated in the United States, in some of
the big cities you can find a lot of law schools and then you
can find vast stretches where law schools are not easily
accessible. In fact, many of our students live dozens, if not
hundreds, of miles away from the nearest law school.



Q. What is your current enrollment? And do you have any
enrollment projections for the next couple of years?
A. We have a rolling admissions policy, and we had 157
students enroll with us the first year we were in operation.
We are now two months into our second year. We currently have
175 people in the school. We believe by the end of 2000 we
will have closer to 500 people in the school.

The Concord education as it currently exists is just the first
and second year of a four-year curriculum. In other words,
students who want to transfer in from other schools who are in
their final years are generally turned away at this point in
time because we don't have the curriculum to handle them. So
we will continue to grow in size, but we are pretty much
adding the curriculum as our current set of students needs it.



Q. How would you respond to critics who say that legal
education loses something when students learn in isolation?
A. The critics who claim that have never taught online. ...
There is no question that the process loses something when
someone learns in isolation, but with the online education
that Concord has devised, nobody is learning in isolation.
They are in small groups. They are in communities that we have
set up. They have more interaction with the professor than you
would get at a fixed-facility law school. So I can agree to
the statement that the process loses something in isolation,
but I wouldn't agree that online education actually means
isolation. In fact, in many ways it can mean a lot more
interaction between student and professor.

Q. What has Concord's retention been like?
A. We are running at a retention rate of about 73 percent,
which, according to distance-education models we have looked
at, seems very, very high. Other distance-education models
only result in about 55- to 60-percent retention levels.

I talked earlier about the encouragement we give to the
students. We have an assistant dean of students who monitors
every student's progress. And, of course, as an online school
it is easier for us to know how students are doing. We know
when they click in. We know what lectures they watch. We know
how they are proceeding through the curriculum, and we do act
paternalistically or maternalistically, however you want to
put it, in interacting with the students.

Q. Because Concord is not accredited, some of your graduates
may be limited in where they can practice law. How big of a
drawback is it not to have accreditation?
A. It is obviously discouraging for students who understand
the kind of caliber education we have here and that they may
be limited in terms of what kind of law they can practice. A
student who attends Concord in the juris doctor program could
sit for the California bar later, and upon passing the
California bar, other states, depending upon their reciprocity
rules, may open up to him or her.

There probably would be a lot more students who would want to
attend the juris doctor program if it were completely
accredited so that they could practice in any state. But,
having said that, if you understand our market, most of our
students who are attending here are not necessarily going to
put down everything and practice law afterward. They are
looking, perhaps, for an ability to interact with the
corporate legal departments better, or an ability to
understand the contracts that run by their desks a little bit
better. So in that sense it hasn't been a deterrent to them at
all.

So we keep trying, and in fact we have met with various
accrediting bodies, and we keep putting forward the message. I
think it is just a question of time, and over time we will
gain acceptance. And I think the quality of our graduates will
speak very well for the school.

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http://chronicle.com/free/2000/01/2000010401u.htm

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Copyright 2000 by The Chronicle of Higher Education