Three years ago, the Mitchell Hamline School of Law broke with tradition to launch the nation’s first “hybrid” law degree program, allowing students like her to do most of their work online with only occasional visits to campus.
Ever since, the hidebound legal profession has been waiting anxiously to see how these “hybrid students” fare in the real world.
Now, it’s about to find out.
On Sunday, Al Taqatqa, a 29-year-old from Mound, became one of the first graduates of what Mark Gordon, the dean of the law school, calls “the evening and weekend program of the 21st century.”
Technically, Al Taqatqa and 15 of her classmates are finishing a year ahead of schedule; the program is designed to take four years.
Instead of face-to-face classes, the hybrid students spend 11 or 12 weeks studying online each semester. Officially, half of their credits are earned online; the rest are crammed into one intensive “capstone” week on campus. First- and second-year students also spend a week on campus before classes begin.
It’s a far cry from the traditional Socratic method, where a professor might stand in front of a lecture hall and randomly pick out students for public grilling. That practice, of challenging students to think on their feet, has long been a pillar of law school, and one reason the profession is wary of online degrees, said Andrew Perlman, dean of the Suffolk University Law School in Boston.
“The argument, I think, is that at least some pieces are lost if you move too far in the online direction,” said Perlman, who chairs the Center for Innovation for the American Bar Association (ABA). “But the Mitchell Hamline experiment is certainly one that a lot of people are watching.”
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