This post provides my three main takeaways from the book Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education[1] regarding the implications for law schools and legal education. This book examines Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other platforms that allow for learning at scale—i.e., environments with many students and few teachers. According to the author Justin Reich, educational technologies associated with learning at scale are more likely to make incremental enhancements to learning than to fundamentally alter educational systems.
Reich began his career as a K-12 teacher, and he now runs MIT’s Teaching Systems Labs, which focuses on K-12 education. His book covers both the K-12 and university environments.
Because it was published in 2020, the book includes only passing references to the pandemic. Reich authored a follow-up article for the Chronicle of Higher Education about the pandemic’s impact on the issues raised in the book.
Informal Learning at Scale
“Now is the