A collaborative course project on International Human Rights

Dr. Işıl Aral, Koç University – Faculty of Law:

"I collaborated with the University of Liège within the framework of our International Human Rights Law courses, taught separately at our institutions during Spring 2022, which involved four main steps from planning to assessment. 

The first step was to exchange the syllabi of our courses to make the experience as collaborative as possible. It was easy to cooperate on the course plan as we followed almost the same topics every week. We reviewed the reading lists in each other's syllabus, which led to minor improvements in our respective courses. 

Secondly, we taught a session to each other’s students. For instance, I gave a lecture on the United Nations human rights protection mechanisms to Liège students, and my colleague Christophe Deprez gave a lecture on the European human rights protection mechanisms to Koç students. We did these sessions online during the 2021-22 academic year because of the pandemic, but we discussed having them face-to-face, if possible, in the upcoming years. 

Thirdly, we divided the students into mixed groups for the Virtual Exchange. The only problem we had at this stage was the imbalance between the number of students taking respective courses at each institution: the class in Liège had 120 students whereas Koç had 20 students. Therefore, we arranged to have 6 Liège students and 1 Koç student in each group. This may not seem to be the ideal scenario at first but did not pose a serious impediment for the group work activity. We assigned each group a European Court of Human Rights judgment to review and told each student to prepare a certain part of the judgment. Students gathered for a 90-minute meeting on Zoom on a determined date. Students first  gave a 5-minute presentation about their section. Afterwards, they were asked to discuss the judgment for approximately an hour. We also provided the students with a list of questions to guide the discussion.

Finally, we asked students to write a reaction paper based on this discussion, summarizing the judgment and writing down the different views put forward, and then justifying their views. They all scored very well in this task. After the group activity, I asked each student for their comments. They were all content about the group activity and discussions that took place.  I - as an instructor - also enjoyed the process and experience very much and definitely consider being active in future relevant endeavors."