On September 18 - 20, 2014, TJSL Associate Dean William H. Byrnes led The Working Group's fall workshop at William Mitchell College of Law, in St. Paul Minnesota aimed at drafting best practices recommendations for online legal education. For over four years, Byrnes, often attributed with having pioneered the “online classroom,” has collaborated with educators of over fifty law schools from all tiers to finalize the Best Practices for Legal Education Leveraging Distance Learning Technologies.
Byrnes, who heads the Graduate Distance Education Programs at TJSL, became involved with distance education models after he suffered a traumatic injury in a ski accident. Since then, Byrnes has developed online, multi-media teaching methodologies that effectively ignore disability. Byrnes multi-media approach continuously incorporates the newest technologies to accommodate a wide range of disabilities, making it easier for many more individuals to achieve their educational goals.
“Students who don’t suffer with disabilities also learn in different ways, some are visual learners, some are auditory learners. If we don’t teach using different modalities we are leaving students behind and that is wrong," Byrnes emphasized to Authority Press Wire. "I believe that education is part of human development and we need to deliver it to all of humankind.”
