12-02, 14:30–15:00 (Europe/Berlin), Stage 2, Einstein-Saal, BBAW
Prof. Dr. Krisztina Karsai and Dr. András Lichtenstein introduce DIGICRIMJUS, an EU supported higher education strategic partnership on Digitalisation and Criminal Law formed by three European universities (University of Szeged - Hungary, University of Konstanz – Germany, University of Istanbul – Turkey) and how they applied virtual exchange and blended mobility to implement their activities during COVID travel restrictions.
In the first part of the presentation, Prof. Dr. Karsai will introduce DIGICRIMJUS, an EU supported (KA203) higher education strategic partnership on Digitalisation and Criminal Law.
This partnership was formally initiated in 2020, just before the introduction of COVID travel restrictions and in achieving the foreseen learning outcomes a great emphasis was laid on physical international exchange in learning, teaching training activities. By the time the implementation of the project started, this became impossible and the project team had to adapt quickly to the new circumstances by being among the first ones to introduce virtual exchange and blended mobility into their program. She will explain in detail what adjustments had to be made to tailor the plans to the changed landscape, what were the biggest challenges and how they managed to successfully overcome them. An emphasis is laid on how and why teaching and learning law differs from other (social- and natural) sciences and what effect did this have in this particular case.
In the second part, Dr. András Lichtenstein will share his personal journey from being a former student participant in the partners’ previous projects to become a university lecturer and assistant project manager of DIGICRIMJUS thanks to the impact of international cooperation. He will explain how he used this experience to facilitate the collaboration of a new generation of international learners meeting each other for the first time via a computer screen. To support their claim of establishing a good practice, the presenters will also show and evaluate the results of their project’s student participant feedback surveys.
In their closing remarks, the presenters – both experts in digital training and blended learning – will summarize the most important lessons learnt on their path and share their best practices which may be reused and replicated in similar projects. They will also reflect on their future plans and improvements in blended learning and will recommend some of their other digitalization related project outcomes.
András Lichtenstein, LL.M. is a Lecturer in Criminal Law and Procedure at the University of Szeged (Hungary) and is specialized in Hungarian, European and Comparative Criminal Procedure. He graduated in Law with a major in Criminal Justice and holds a joint Master’s (LL.M.) in German Law and Legal Translation from the Universities Potsdam and Szeged. He is a Digital Training Coordinator at the Faculty of Law, and a Member of Management and Academic Staff of the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership for Higher Education „DIGICRIMJUS: New challenges for teaching researching and practicing criminal law in the digital age”.
Prof. Dr. Krisztina Karsai is the Head of the renowned Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Science at the University of Szeged (Hungary). She is an expert in European and International Criminal Law as well as in Comparative Criminal Law and is accounted for by several international publishers. She had held a Jean Monnet Chair on the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice funded by the European Union (ERASMUS+ 574324-EEP-1-2016-1-HU-EPPJMO-CHAIR). In 2017 she founded the concept contest “Human-Machine-Law” focusing on various legal issues from digitalization. She teaches courses on Criminal Law and Digitalization not only in Hungary but abroad in Hungarian, German and English. Her innovative educational project on criminal cases was awarded the "Shortlisted" label on the QS Wharton Reimagine Education Award (Ethical Visualisation of Criminal Cases) in 2015. Prof. Karsai is now the leader of the Interdisciplinary Research Group "Artificial Intelligence and the Law" at the University of Szeged.