Dayton Law & 2U Partner to Create Hybrid JD

Dayton Law has received a variance from the ABA allowing it to offer a hybrid in-person/online JD program.  Students will be required to come to campus for one week each semester.  One particularly interesting feature of this program is that it's being offered in partnership with 2U, a tech/education/marketing company that is active in the Master of Legal Studies space, paired with law schools at Washington University in St. Louis and Pepperdine.  I'm curious to understand the details of the ABA variance - to understand, among other things,  the percentage of student credits that can be earned online as well as the breadth of upper level courses Dayton intends to offer online.  

Big changes in ABA online education regulations for all law schools may also be in the offing - if the ABA adopts modifications to Standard 306.  But these changes do no appear to go as far as what the ABA has approved here for Dayton. 

Comments

[Anon]

Great, one of the worst law schools in the country has just made its academic program even less rigorous. Wasn't this one of the first law schools to adopt a 2-year JD. Clearly Dayton doesn't care about its students.

[Leo]

Doubt this will get much traction. My sense is that online LLM programs have not taken off, many schools will see this as even more downmarket than evening programs, and most especially most tenured profs will not want to learn how to develop an online course and teach it effectively. There are also issues of providing the full range of support services to students at a distance, from library to career services and everything in between.

I remember years ago when law schools begged the ABA to loosen the standards governing online education. It did and few did anything with it.

2U will probably handle the technical aspects and work with faculty on creating the courses and train faculty. In that regard, this partnership is not new. I work at a university doing the same with non JD programs and another company in the space.