Topic outline

  • 1.Welcome

    Welcome Remarks from Professor Gongrenren, director of RCHR 

    Dear everyone:

    You are welcome to the Pilot E-Course on human rights methodology. This is jointly offered by the Research Centre for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (RCHR) of Peking University and Roaul Wollenburg Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law of Lund University, Sweden. This short course introduces participants to the basics of human rights research methodology, ethics and skills of writing an academic paper.

    The course is intended to build a foundation for other courses of the human rights master programme. The Course includes four sections:

    1. Sources of Human Rights

    2. How and Where to Find Information

    3. Citing and Referencing

    4. Academic Writting

    When you pass the quiz, you will get 20 points out of 100 for the Core Rights Course.

    In order to best feed this pilot e-course to the current progrramme, we would like you to give comments both on the content and the methods of the pilot e-course. A questionnaire will be sent out to you individually after your completion of this e-course. Further revisions will be made in terms of structure and content of the course according to your feedback of the questionnaire. Thank you very much in advance for taking your time to do the questionnaire.

    • 2.How to Navigate the Course

      How do you navigate the course?

      The course is divided into four parts. Each part starts with the learning objectives.
      Then follows a lesson . Click to see the main content of that part of the course.
      At the end of some lessons, there will be small exercises, which will allow you to practice what you have just learned.
      Some parts of course will also provide you with additional useful readings and weblinks that you can download and click on for further information.
      At the end of the course you will find a final quiz, which will be graded and which you will have to pass to finalise the course.
      When you have finished the lessons, click on the 'end lesson'-button, which will take you back to the main course page.

      • 3.Sources of Human Rights

        Learning objectives

        After completing this part of the course, you will know:

        √ What are sources of Human Rights

        √ Differences of Treaties, Customary International Law, Cases and Jurisprudence

         

      • 4.How and Where to Find Information

        From this section you will learn how and where to find information. In this internet era, you may have the feeling of swimming in the ocean. When you type a key word or words and google what you want, the results might be thousands. The skills to find information on the internet are very important. Besides, hard copies information should not be put aside. Many excellent monographs and papers are in the library. How to find books and articles in different kinds of journals or yearbooks is also a useful skill. 

        Learning objectives

        After completing this part of the course, you will know how and where to find the following information:

        √ International human rights treaties

        √ UN documents, such as UNGA and other UN resolutions, decisions, reports, etc.

        √ Cases of the ICJ, ICTY, IRTY, etc.

        √ Books and articles

      • 5.Citing and Referencing

        Introduction

        • Unless you are a fiction writer, almost all writing is to a large degree based on other sources
        • An important part of academic research – both during your time at Beida and afterwards – is to use the work of others to either support or challenge the idea you are arguing for or against
        • It is fully legitimate to use other peoples’ words, or facts that you have found in other sources, in your own work. Often it is necessary to do so to make your point.

        Learning objectives

        After completing this module, students will

        √ Understand why referencing is important

        √ Understand what plagiarism is and how to avoid it

        √ How to quote and how to paraphrase

      • 6.Academic Writing

        From this section you will learn how to write essays.

        Learning objectives

        After completing this part of the course, you will know:

        √ What are essays

        √ What an essay should have:

        • An introduction
        • Test
        • conclusion

      • 7. Final Quiz