Singularity Law

For many years, Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles (where I am a professor) has offered a unique LL.M program in Entertainment and Media Law. The program is open to lawyers worldwide, and has attracted lawyers from many countries. Unfortunately, a large number of lawyers who would be interested in getting an LL.M have found it impossible to take the time from their law practices (and their families) to come to Los Angeles for a year or more to complete the program.

Several years ago, the school began looking into how the Internet could be used to provide a totally online LL.M program. After an enormous amount of planning, our online LL.M program in entertainment and media law will be launched this fall. Internet law courses will be an integral part of that program. Information on the program is available here.

Restructuring traditional courses to work online has been – and continues to be – a challenging, but surprisingly satisfying, experience. It has allowed me to rethink each of the courses I have been teaching face-to-face, and to reimagine how the subject matter can be taught online. I have found it necessary to totally redo my syllabus, the way in which I organize my lectures, and what reading materials are best suited for a distance-learning environment. This effort has made me realize how some of these innovations can be integrated back into my traditional courses, which I believe will make the classroom experience significantly more engaging, and in the end more effective.

For many traditional law courses, which change little from year-to-year, once the syllabus is created and the lectures are “in the can,” most of the hard work of an online course is done. But in the area of Internet law, the subject matter is changing virtually every day. One of the major challenges has been to organize the materials and to structure the lectures and assignments in such a way that it won’t be necessary to redo the course entirely every time it is given (which will be three times a year). Instead of long-form lectures, the course has been designed with a series of shorter, topic-specific lectures. Some of the lectures will be usable from term-to-term with little or no updating. Other lectures will need to be re-recorded virtually every term to incorporate the newest developments in case law, statutory provisions and technological developments.

Of course, whether my course design will work online (or not) will be largely theoretical until I have been through the course at least once. Only when I look back at how well the structure worked the first time, and envision how well it will work the second and third time out, will I know if my redesign worked – or whether another redo will be in order. I’ll let you know in six months or so.