Over the weekend, the first blended J.D. program available in the U.S. accredited by the American Bar Association (ABA) graduated its first class of 16 learners. Though the students who participated in the hybrid program at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law received the same degree as their peers in other institutions, they did not spend the same amount of time in the classroom.

Most coursework was completed online, and students rarely needed to come in to campus except for occasional ‘capstone’ weeks and an initial orientation period in the first and second year.

Online and blended degrees have surged forward in numerous fields in North America as more and more students prefer a flexible and affordable path to graduation. But for law degrees, or Juris Doctors (J.D.), the iceberg has been slow to melt.

The First of Its Kind

Two years ago, Mitchell Hamline had to get special permission from the ABA to proceed with their blended residency program. If something isn’t adding up, then your deductive skills are sharp. Law school typically takes three years. The 16 who graduated earlier this month, however, packed in more coursework than the typical law student in order to complete their program ahead of schedule.

“We found that a lot of students just wanted to accelerate,” said law school dean Mark Gordon, according to the Star Tribune. “And the way the program was structured, they were able to.”

Each semester is organized into 11-12 week periods where students take care of half of their coursework. For one week per semester, learners then travel to campus and undergo a super-intensive capstone week. These week-long marathons account for the other half of their credits.

It might sound unconventional, but it has the blessing of the ABA. “The argument, I think, is that at least some pieces are lost if you move too far in the online direction. But the Mitchell Hamline experiment is certainly one that a lot of people are watching,” said Andrew Perlman to the Star Tribune. Perlman is the dean of the Suffolk Law School in Boston and chair of the ABA’s Center for Innovation.

It bears mentioning that many universities and institutions do teach law online in some capacity. An Online Master of Laws degree (LL.M.) can help current lawyers progress in the workforce or allow lawyers who received their degrees in other countries get up to speed with the American legal system. They will not, however, be allowed to take a given state’s bar exam and become a certified barrister with an LL.M. alone.

How Will the Law School Stack Up?

That’s why many lawyers (both present and future), firms, and educators will be watching the graduates of Mitchell Hamline so closely. The program has several benefits, namely allowing individuals currently occupied with anything besides their education (be it caregiving, homemaking, or a job), to pursue a law degree. It remains to be seen, however, how Mitchell Hamline graduates will perform.

But everyone involved in the process is highly optimistic. “I don’t know that any of us had a clear idea how it was going to turn out,” said Mitchell Hamline professor Michael Steenson. “But it really exceeded my wildest expectations.

Since the program launched in 2015, the program has received 400-500 applications for the the program that accepts only 96 every year.

While the institution has yet to complete its monitoring of their first graduates’ success and report back to the ABA, dean Mark Gordon is optimistic. “So far, all of the indicators are that [the students] are learning the material as well as our traditional students.”

Two recent graduates—Brian Kennedy and Al Taqatqa—even won acclaim at an international law student competition in Oslo, Norway in the summer of 2017. “We were absolutely aware that we were carrying the banner for the genre, the hybrid genre,” Kennedy told the Star Tribune. “[But the judges] were not aware that we were anything other than just law students.”

The success of Mitchell Hamline’s program is beginning to bring the ABA around. An advisory panel concluded a few months ago that the association should ease up their standards for online programs. Last November, Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles won the second permission issued by the ABA to launch a blended program. It is set to launch in 2019.

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The benefits of online education and remote degrees has been proven. It may not be able to replace all in-person, traditional instruction in every field, but it can come pretty close. In some cases, it can even exceed a traditional college course.

But online programs also come with their challenges. A singular obstacle is that, by their nature, they can be isolating.

“In the 1990s,” wrote Professor Wen-Li Chyr in a recent study, “it was found that students felt physically isolated when they participated in online courses, especially when the instructor could not immediately provide feedback to learners … These issues are still present today.”

Undoubtedly, the isolating nature of online programs have kept learners from enrolling, especially those who thrive in a social setting.

For other degrees, some things simply can’t be taught online.

What many learners do not realize, however, is that many programs offer in-person residencies for online degrees in almost every field.

What Is a Residency?

An online degree residency will vary by institution, field of study, and level of degree. A typical residency might include gathering an online class on campus one or two weekends per semester. It might be a ten day retreat every summer. It might involve team building exercises, soft skills workshops, networking events, or hands-on coursework.

In other words, there is no typical residency for an online program. It is difficult, in fact, to extract any commonalities, even between residencies in the same field.

One constant is that educators who lead residency programs seek to provide learners with an experience that cannot be delivered via the internet.

“We don’t want to repeat anything on campus that couldn’t be accomplished online,” said Sean Bulger, a sports sciences professor at West Virginia University, according to U.S. News. The online sports sciences master’s program at WVU includes a residency requirement. This includes checking out WVU’s athletics facilities to get an in-person understanding of how things work. According to Bulger, the residency also “gives experienced teachers the opportunity to watch other experienced teachers do their thing, which is difficult to replicate online.”

There’s Probably a Residency Available in Your Field of Study

The online MBA at Penn State begins with an orientation residency. During this time, students meet one another and their faculty members for opportunities to network and gear up for the program that will advance their careers, not to mention acquire skills regarding how to succeed in a virtual learning environment.

Southern New Hampshire University has long been a leader in online programs. Their Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction and Non-fiction has been a stand-out success when it comes to teaching the fine arts remotely.

Students meet with professors and mingle with each other once at the beginning of each semester at a hotel in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. After that, each student works with their assigned professors to develop their work-in-progress into a finished, publishable piece. The program allows professionals to keep their job or maintain their role in their family while pursuing their MFA on the side.

The International Center for Studies in Creativity at SUNY Buffalo State offers a master’s level distance program in Creativity and Change Leadership. The program is a true example of blended learning: it is divided up into six different ‘blocks.’ Four of these blocks are taught remotely, while the remaining two occur on campus during the summer. These two different blocks occur at the beginning and end of the program. They are intentionally scheduled to overlap, so that students who are about to complete the program can mingle and network with those who are just entering.

In the words of education expert Judith Boettcher, “we learn as social beings in a social context.” While advances in technology have helped improve the eLearning experience, educators still struggle to create a collaborative engaging experience with online programs. Residency programs have the potential to bridge the virtual gap between learners, their peers, and instructors.

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The University of Colorado is currently in the midst of an effort to bring more of their courses online. A team of administrators is hoping to make it easier for professors to teach online classes and even offer some degrees for remote students.

Last week, the CU Board of Regents and University Affairs cast their support behind the plan  and have greenlighted the necessary funds.

It will cost an estimated $20 million and entirely replace the existing online system. It’s going to require completely revamping several aspects of CU’s digital infrastructure, including student registration, admissions, and financial aid.

One of the architects behind the plan is Professor Michael Lightner, who serves as a vice president for academic affairs at the institution as well as a professor in computer engineering. “There’s good support for this,” Lightner told the Daily Camera. “It’s a big deal. It really is enabling us to accelerate the online programs.”

“This proposal is focused on the goals and the money,” Lightner continued. “We’ve got a lot of work for February.”

Serving a unique state

Lightner and other administrators seek to make a college education more affordable and accessible. In a state with a large, diffuse rural population, it should come as a welcome change.

Future students will be able to complete their courses on their own time, and there will be multiple start-dates for courses throughout a given semester.

The efforts, unfortunately, are expected to take years to be completed. The institution hopes to launch a bachelor’s and master’s level course in the fall semester of 2022. To enroll, it will cost students a single, fixed fee of $15,000 for their entire program, which will also include all university fees, textbooks, and learning materials. By the following year, the University of Colorado estimates that 6,000 students will be pursuing an exclusively online degree.

To compare, annual tuition at CU for Arts and Sciences students currently sits at $12,086. Books are an additional $1,800. The biggest cost, however, is on campus room and board, which runs students roughly $14,000. Yearly costs of attending the Boulder campus average around $30,000.

According to the resolution forwarded this week, “It is acknowledged that most of these students will be part-time and thus a concurrent goal is 1,500 graduates of online-only programs per year.”

As with any migration from in-person to online, it’s going to be an uphill battle convincing both students and professors that an online degree can be worth someone’s time, money, and effort.

University of Colorado’s online status

While it’s going to take awhile to reach these goals, CU will be offering more online courses as soon as January, 2018. One of these courses is a post-baccalaureate degree in computer science.

“This program is just as rigorous as our on-campus bachelor of science or bachelor of arts degrees, taught by the same faculty,” said professor Kirk Grunwald, another faculty member behind the movement. “The only difference is we focus on core computer science classes so students can complete the degree quickly.”

CU already has 41 programs available online. But they have not met a previous goal of enrolling 6,000 students into these. The revamped online program hopes to change that. One strategy they will use to meet this goal is to incorporate K-12 offerings by 2024.

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