My last class of the semester is tomorrow. Here are a few thoughts on the mid-semester shift from law teaching in person to law teaching remotely via Zoom, at least from one professor's perspective.

All other things being equal, I'd never pick to teach remotely via Zoom instead of in person. It's harder to read the room, harder to focus students, and harder to get students to engage. Nothing can match being in the room.

With that said, law school is relatively well-suited to remote instruction. You can lecture, you can do a Socratic discussion, students can ask questions, you can do slides, etc. All the basics are there. Not as good, but all there.

A difficulty with assessing the transition to on-line instruction this semester is that we had to shift quickly and couldn't think through all the options. It's a crazy pass-fail time, and we were just trying to create a semblance of normalcy.

If we end up having to do remote instruction in the fall, there are a few things I would want to try that I didn't try this semester. Maybe online quizzes, or having recommended (maybe required) student check-in with me, to make sure students are engaged and let me check on them.

Along those lines, @DBRodriguez5 had an outstanding suggestion recently: We should be spending time this summer thinking carefully about how to optimize online law school for this fall assuming it's needed. We owe it to our students. https://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2020/04/a-call-for-a-virtual-summit-on-online-legal-education.html

Relatedly, I hope law students will take the opportunity, either in course evaluations or elsewhere, saying what worked best or worst for them in the online setting. We profs were doing our best, but we don't see the student perspective ourselves; feedback re online is key.

We can hope that everything goes back to normal soon, of course. But if we're in for a window of public-health-induced virtual law school, we need to make it the best experience for our students that we possibly can. /end