Author: Iman Khodri – Chair of the Create Committee
Committee: Create Committee
Date: 02/02/2024
On October 10, 2023, my colleague Ms. Veronica Carbone and I, Iman Khodri, gave a lecture at the EU law class at University Milano Bicocca in front of around 190 students about the European public prosecutor’s office.
Our experiment was based on splitting the class in two groups: the first half hour we lectured them all together on the basic notions and the general part of the European public prosecutor’s office, so everyone started at the same level.
The second step of the “experiment” was to keep one of the groups in class and excuse the rest of the class for half an hour, at this point Ms. Carbone lectured them on the procedures of the EPPO in a traditional way explaining exactly what the office does, what the prosecutors’ functions are and how they proceed, and step by step she explained everything with no visual aids just a frontal traditional lecture. At the end of the lecture we gave them an online test to do in 10 minutes that consisted in 10 multiple answers questions.
The third step was to switch the groups, recall the other students that were asked to leave for half an hour and teach them exactly the same thing, but this time with the use of the VR game’s videos on the big screen. At the end of the lecture, they had the same exact test from the first group to answer in the same amount of time.
We then analysed the data that came out of these two tests and the students gave us back exactly what we needed to to demonstrate, what we were there to do: the two groups actually triumphed on a 50% rate: 5 of the questions to the test were totally theoretical and 5 questions were totally practical: the first group which was taught traditionally had performed better in the general theoretical questions whereas the second group triumphed in the questions on the technical aspects of the procedure. It’s important also to see that whenever one of the groups overcame the other the difference was of a very small percentage.
So, what what we wanted to demonstrate was that it would be really interesting to see how the students would perform academically if they were met with some courses that have technical aspects to them and not just theoretical, if that would improve the way of teaching.
How much of an improvement would this method bring to students nowadays because up until now we are taught in a traditional way in every course, we do not have any practical experience yet.