Award-winning law professor shows up for his students 'with warmth, intention, and real energy'
Professor Mohsen Manesh is raising the bar for online education at the University of Oregon’s School of Law with a focus on innovation and continuous improvement.
“If someone’s interested in doing online teaching, a willingness to do things differently is all you need,” said Manesh, the Mr. & Mrs. L.L. Stewart Professor of Business Law.
As director of the law school’s Portland program, he had long been experimenting with teaching students 120 miles away in Eugene, but the pandemic was a key turning point. When it became clear that students would be facing the kind of disruptions in their day-to-day lives that would make even synchronous remote instruction difficult, he started exploring what other instructors were doing.
“I came to it from the perspective of a student,” Manesh said. “Does it seem effective to me? Is this the kind of course I would want to take? Is this the kind of Canvas page I would want to navigate?”
Manesh joined the online course design workshop that UO Online and the Teaching Engagement Program put together in the summer of 2020, which provided an opportunity to build structure around his ideas.
The UO Online team has worked closely with Manesh over the years.
“Mohsen cares deeply about his students, and he shows up for them with warmth, intention, and real energy,” said Tim Sorg, Senior Instructional Designer with UO Online. “He is a dynamic educator; just as passionate thinking big about the arc of his program as he is drilling down into the best practices of Canvas design.”
His first iteration of online teaching went well, but Manesh felt inspired to explore new ideas and has been expanding asynchronous elements in his classes ever since.
Designing online learning within the law school presents unique advantages and challenges, Manesh said. While each student has already obtained a college degree and is an advanced learner, law school courses traditionally have little in the way of assessment, which can make it difficult for online students to stay engaged week to week.
The level of retention, the level of learning, that happens in my asynchronous or hybrid courses is better than what was happening in my in-person version of the same course.
In his Sales Law course, Manesh said it’s especially important to make sure students really understand the material because it’s a topic included in the bar exam. So instead of deciding grades based on an end-of-semester exam, Manesh has built in regular opportunities for students to assess where they’re at. Each week, students submit homework for review and take a quiz that's scored and counts toward their final grade.
“It’s that kind of accountability structure in an online course that I think is so instrumental in getting students to learn and engage with the material from the outset,” he added.
Instructional designer Andrea De Lei, who reviewed one of Manesh's courses, said that she “saw a clear and organized course structure, thoughtful communication of expectations, and intentional design choices that helped support student engagement.”
By far, the most time-consuming part of developing and updating his courses is the lecture videos, which are highly scripted and edited and include animated PowerPoint slides. With how timely the law is, every time the statute changes, he needs to re-record the lectures.
As associate dean of faculty research and programs, Manesh has been looking at other formats and platforms that could streamline the process for himself and his faculty colleagues at scale in hopes of expanding online education in the law school.
Manesh said he’s seen the benefits first-hand and feels inspired when students who've graduated tell him how impactful his classes have been in their real lives.
“The level of retention, the level of learning, that happens in my asynchronous or hybrid courses is better than what was happening in my in-person version of the same course,” he said.
In 2025, he received the Herman Award for Outstanding Online Education in recognition of his contributions. Manesh said winning the award was humbling.
“There’s a lot of people on campus who are doing truly amazing and innovative things online,” he said.
President Karl Scholz stopped into a faculty meeting to present Manesh and his colleague Adell Amos with their Distinguished Teaching Awards last spring.
“Being recognized alongside (Amos) made it particularly meaningful because at the law school we put an emphasis on good classroom instruction and student-faculty relationships, and so to have that recognized at the university level is really special,” Manesh said.
— By Chelsea Hunt, Office of the Provost Communications