Bernd Heinrich, a professor of criminal law at the Faculty of Law, became active shortly after the CIVIS alliance was founded, at the suggestion of the President’s Office, to initiate cooperation in his field. When he sent out a request to all the CIVIS universities, Heinrich was delighted to find that almost every university had someone interested in such a network. “At an initial exploratory meeting in Tübingen in 2021, funded by CIVIS, it quickly became clear that we wanted to hold a joint seminar,” says Heinrich. In the next step, the group organized a series of online classes for students. Each university provided videos introducing the civil, criminal, and public law of their respective countries. Around 30 half-hour films were produced – a brief comparison of European law that each university can use for its own purposes.
Professor Dr. You Jae Lee, Director of Korean Studies at the University of Tübingen, set out to establish a network for Korean studies within CIVIS to step up academic exchange and promote the mobility of students and teachers. Lee says Korean Studies are increasingly popular among students, but teaching capacities remain limited: “It made sense to join forces and combine the respective strengths of the partner universities.” To this end, the researcher explored which CIVIS universities have departments of Korean Studies and contacted the departments in Aix-Marseille, Bucharest, Rome, and Stockholm. “The feedback was consistently positive,” says Lee. After several online meetings, Lee's group was able to plan a European Korean Studies E-School Consortium, a program with online teaching. The project launched in the winter semester of 2021/22 with the first three online courses; since then, each partner university has offered one course per year, and over 850 students have participated in the e-school so far.
Firmly established courses and additional teaching projects
The initiatives in Korean Studies and Law are now firmly established and have been expanded to include additional components. You Jae Lee got other universities to participate. In addition to the online courses, the partners have established an annual Graduate Summer School where Master's and doctoral students can present their research. Law professor Bernd Heinrich has added a number of test questions to the video series on comparative law and regularly offers it as a foreign-language course, as required in the state examination curriculum. The format of the Blended Intensive Programs (BIPs), which combine online teaching with a one-week attendance phase, opened up another possible application in 2022: The videos now form the basis of the online component of the BIP Europe and the Rule of Law, which has taken place annually since then. “In preparatory face-to-face meetings, we discuss what we want to change or who still needs to deliver or update a video,” says Heinrich, “but otherwise it's now set up and runs smoothly.”
