Paralegal Blog

CALS holds academic honesty paramount for paralegal education. Students must learn to use citations when incorporating ideas and words from others and write with direct intent. To help students and faculty identify areas of improvement, CALS has partnered with a powerful plagiarism detection tool called Copyleaks. This tool will be available on submitted work through Canvas LMS beginning February 2023.

A good instructor will evaluate your school performance in much the same way that a supervisor will assess your execution of work responsibilities. You will receive feedback on your knowledge, recall, competence, quality of product, completeness, communication skills, time management, punctuality, and more.

Sometimes that feedback can make you feel threatened and insecure.

Before shifting the blame for any shortcomings to your instructor, remember that getting better at anything requires feedback and follow-up. Accepting feedback, even if it is not candy-coated, is an opportunity to improve, grow your competencies, and advance your career. Faculty move into higher education because they genuinely like to teach. They care about their profession and want to make a difference – connecting with students is a big part of that. Keep the following points in mind the next time you receive instructor feedback:

Skepticism. Acceptance. Preference. Necessity.
The advancement of distance education at Center for Advanced Legal Studies

Over the past 15 years, we have witnessed the rise of distance education and its progression from being viewed with skepticism to acceptance, from acceptance to preference, and now, from preference to necessity. In 2006, no one at Center for Advanced Legal Studies (CALS) imagined that in little more than a decade we would go from having a few hundred campus-based paralegal students, with none online, to having no campus-based students and over two hundred online.

Unlike many educational institutions who scrambled to implement virtual learning as a result of COVID-19 restrictions, CALS was able to migrate all its campus-based students to online delivery in less than a weekend. It helped that by March 2020 five out of six students at CALS were already taking their classes online. The skepticism many previously felt regarding online classes had long since shifted to a strong preference for them, and those who selected campus-based classes chose them more as a matter of personal preference and convenience than from any concern over the effectiveness of distance learning. We miss being on campus and seeing our students, and we know they feel the same, but we continue to successfully educate and train students to become paralegals, just as we have since 1987.

Everyone became acutely aware of a looming epidemic in the second week of March 2020. We watched numbers grow exponentially on an interactive map with ominous red bubbles moving from around the globe to our local areas. Our response was to spray Lysol, scowl at those who sniffled, sneezed or coughed; and wonder what would come next. Oh my!

Thankfully, I have not been infected by the COVID-19 virus, but I have been affected by its presence in our communities.

A little history about how we deliver Paralegal classes

In less than a decade we have witnessed a dramatic change in the preference incoming students have for attending paralegal classes. Up until 2006, students could only choose between morning and evening classes. Morning students attended Monday-Thursday from 8:00AM-12:00PM, and evening students attended Monday, Tuesday and Thursday evenings from 6:00-10:00PM.

In 2006 we introduced a hybrid evening program, where students attended their first 4 courses as usual, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday on campus, and then attended just one night per week in person while completing the balance of their studies online. This provided evening students relief from the three night per week schedule, while still incorporating a live classroom experience into their schedules. This program was very popular.