Today I close out my 5-part series of blog posts reporting my very unscientific survey of law faculty experiences during the pandemic. I asked colleagues an open-ended question: Reflecting about your personal experience or about the experience of faculty generally during the pandemic, are there things you would like your law school dean/administration to know?
Representative responses after the fold.
- That distance teaching is exponentially harder than classroom teaching and it despite one teacher leading the class, delivering a good classroom experience requires back office support from assistants, the registrar, IT.
- As the saying goes, a crisis reveals people's true colors. I hope that you were watching. Also, you made little or no effort to either bring people together or facilitate collaboration. It all occurred on its own.
- I think that there is a place for some online learning in law school. I think it would make in person instruction more efficient in some ways. It has inspired me to try some flipped classroom ideas. I think I might free up class time by recording lectures or power points and then getting right to discussion/problem solving in class.
- There is a loose, collective feeling among both students and faculty that increased cheating may be taking place. As we move to online learning, we may need to adjust how we conduct our assessments to address these issues, and the current solutions may not be sufficient.
- Before administrations start rushing to cut the salaries of faculty and others whom they have expected to pitch in and rise to the occasion during constrained times, they might consider all of the work that we do every day and have done even more of now. You can’t keep asking if faculty incessantly and expect them to keep giving.
- We have no clue what we’re doing and we’re doing it very badly. Support and reward those who figure out how to do it well, please.
- Both at my school and generally, to the extent that I could detect similar things at other schools (via social media and email), the collective sense of technological insecurity was and is profound. That's competence and comfort with contemporary technology, not access to it. The practicing bar and related parts of the legal services worlds have embraced tech tools to a startling degree over the last decade. Legal academia - not so much.
- Online teaching is more time consuming than face to face teaching.
- Faculty are human. We are being asked to do more administrative, clerical, and student counseling work in very stressful circumstances. Faculty also need help coping with it all.
- We need to figure out how to recapture or foster (as best we can) the personal exchanges. I am not sure our administrators care about this personal approach since deaning is external and vice deaning is focused on ease of administration. But our admin issues may be more a function of the personalities involved.
Other posts in this series:
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