Blogging about Enforcing EU law

During an elective master course ‘Enforcing EU Law by EU Agencies’ at Utrecht University, Dr. Miroslava Scholten uses blogging. In this way, students contribute to build knowledge in the under studied field of EU law enforcement. The blog page with students’ blog posts is connected to the ‘parent’ blog page on EU law enforcement where monthly blog posts by the experts in the field are being published.

Aims
Introduce students to the modern ways of valorisation of research by creating a blog post disseminating the results of their academic research.

Student’s ECT’s:
The course is an elective course running for three weeks and is for 2,5 ECTS. The group of students includes up to 14 students and students work normally in group of 3 (max 4) for their written papers and blog posts, with an obligation to indicate individual contributions.

Students get: 25% of the final grade for the blog post together in a group;

50% of the final grade for research and paper upon which blog post is normally based;

7.5% of the final grade for evaluating a draft paper from another group;

7.5% of the final grade for evaluating a draft blog post from another group; and

10% of the final grade for oral presentations on a weekly basis.

Teacher efforts
Students write a blog post in addition to and connected to their paper. The teacher and assigned peer students comment on each other’s papers and blog posts. Submitting the final draft before the deadline of submitting the final paper seems to promote the quality of the final paper. While all blog posts are assessed for the final grade, the blog posts of good quality only stay online (to promote the quality, the teacher requests additional comments on the final blog posts within the professional network).

Final product
A blog post at http://eulawenforcement.com/?page_id=1286. For security concerns, this webpage uses a disclaimer stipulating to the reader that this is a work of a student and students are invited to contribute mostly explanatory blog posts on specific (new) developments and processes in the mentioned field. We use only their first names for privacy concerns.

Assessment criteria
The blog post is assessed on the coherence of the structure, accessibility of language for the general public and creativity (visual effects, schemes, tables, etc.). The tips and tricks of writing a good blog post are discussed in class. Also, please, consult helpful materials on blogging in education here.

More information
Dr. Miroslava Scholten, m.scholten@uu.nl