Month: March 2020

Yesterday we had a great pleasure to host a virtual guest lecture by Professor Rupprecht Podszun (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf) on Competition Law and Big Tech. Needless to say the focus was highly topical and the guest covered all the key perspectives/ dimensions, providing some excellent food for thought.

From the skills perspective, students managed to engage in some group activities and teamwork also using sub-channels on Teams and small group video calls. It has been a terrific example of positive embracement of new technology and making most of the difficult circumstances we are all facing.

Many thanks again to Prof. Podszun for this virtual visit. We do hope to be able to host him in person in due course.  

In these difficult time the University switched to fully online provision. Our University key delivery platform will be now Microsoft Teams. Our first class went very well and we managed to continue with good in-class engagement which was great. In more general terms, in our class switching to fully online teaching is somewhat easier thanks to our embracement of OneNote Classroom from the start of the semester. OneNote Classroom allows for a variety of interactions in and outside the classroom. During our first fully online class we did engage in some group work using OneNote and it do pretty well, probably since we were all early familiar with that platform. Now it is time to further develop our skills on this end.

Last Tuesday the School hosted project’s Annual Public High Profile Guest Lecture. This year we were honored to host Dr Mirta Kapural, Member of the Croatian Competition Council.

The lecture was well attended, bringing together students from across the levels in the School as well as external participants, inclusive of prominent local practitioners and academics, also from beyond Northern Ireland.

In her talk Dr Kapural outlined the operation of the Croatian competition system and the competition agency itself. She also mapped out and analysed a variety of challenges facing enforcers nowadays. The talk met with considerable interest of participants, leading to very active and engaging Q&A session.

On Thursday we had the great pleasure to host an open seminar delivered by Professor Sayako Takizawa from Tohoku University in Japan. Professor Takizawa spoke about the challenges and practicalities of regulating powerful digital platforms from a comparative perspective. She analysed the recent developments in relation to Facebook in Germany as well as the recenlty issued soft law in this area in Japan. The seminar was well attended by a range of students and some external attendees.