Graduate Tax Program’s Online Enrollment Enters Fifth Year

With a broad range of courses and new strategies to encourage student engagement, the program continues to break ground in online education.

Now in its fifth year, the online enrollment option of the Graduate Tax Program (GTP) at Boston University School of Law continues to provide active practitioners with a flexible option to earn the School’s highly ranked LLM in Taxation degree.

The GTP offers more than 40 courses to students pursuing the residential and online LLM in Taxation options and those completing the new Estate Planning Certificate. The majority of online courses are available in a hybrid format, in which live, residential courses are captured on video and then uploaded to the course information site for students to watch with text-searchable transcripts of lectures and closed captioning. The program also offers a smaller group of online-only courses, which include learning modules consisting of course content, recorded lectures, and discussion boards. The exclusively online courses allow students to learn from national tax experts located outside the Boston area.

“A lot of what we’re doing here is very innovative and forward thinking,” says Sara Marshall, director of the Graduate Tax Program. “We are at the point where every residential course has an online section.”

Launched in fall 2012, the program began by offering a small number of online-only courses. As enrollment grew with each semester, more online courses were added to the curriculum. To create greater consistency between the online and residential GTP courses, the program began to explore ways to extend residential instruction to online learners. The hybrid course format was introduced in 2014, and over the past two years, the program has expanded to offer more hybrid classes as well as exclusively online classes. The change has given students the opportunity to take a diverse selection of classes not previously available.

Now in its fifth year, the online program is looking to advance online education even further by live streaming course lectures and adding opportunities for real-time engagement between instructors and students.

With 119 students enrolled in the online option—up from 18 at its launch in 2012—the majority of the students are mid-career professionals looking to pursue courses on a part-time basis. Online students have the flexibility to receive the same quality education as residential students without having to relocate to Boston.

Marshall says the online enrollment option is a testing ground for new teaching methods and technologies that allow students and faculty to explore new forms of engagement. For example, in an exercise for Adjunct Professor of Law Joseph Darby’s Tax Aspects of Buying and Selling a Business, online students were put into virtual classroom groups to work together to negotiate transactions.

The online option has also enhanced the learning experiences of the GTP’s residential students, as hybrid instructors have introduced new forms of engagement that can enhance the traditional face-to-face dynamic. “Many of the best practices in online student engagement, including adding assessments and reflective learning opportunities, are available to residential students as well,” Marshall says. “This benefits the program as a whole. Another benefit to residential students is the ability to take up to six credits of online classes towards their degree. Residential students no longer need to miss out on taking a class due to a scheduling conflict. They also appreciate having access to the transcribed lectures.”

A key to the program’s success, Marshall says, is that the online and residential options are administered together, and are thought of as two parts of a whole. “The programs complement each other; an online student’s transcript and diploma is no different from a residential degree, and the reason we can do that is because they are in the same classes, with the same faculty, and held to the same standards as our residential students.”

In addition to the notable tax professionals from the Boston area who make up the GTP’s residential faculty, the online option also allows the program to attract top experts from across the country to teach electives related to their area of practice. For example, Lecturer in Law Corey Smith, who is a senior litigation counsel in the Tax Division of the Department of Justice in Washington DC, currently teaches an online-only course in Criminal Tax.

“Our faculty includes top estate planning professionals, leaders of tax departments at large law firms, tax boutique firms, and all of the Big Four,” says Marshall. “The reason we’ve been able to make this transition to adding online sections for each course is because of the dedication of our staff and the loyalty of the faculty to the program.”

With a growing demand for flexible education, the Graduate Tax Program continues to provide a high quality curriculum that matches students’ needs. “The goal always was and continues to be to not compromise on providing the highest educational standards in teaching,” says Marshall. “That’s something that BU Law has always had a commitment to.”

Reported by Greg Yang (CAS’17)