Here is a chance for you to explore the endless possibilities of interactive online learning with us. HKU will be launching an open online course on the basics of e-learning and blended learning for students, teachers and staffs of all sectors on May 5.
This 15-day course will lead you through design considerations and implementation skills for e-learning at three different scales.
You will:
Convert lecturing portions of traditional face-to-face course into video-lectures and design assessment components
Plan “face time”/active learning activities in blended learning to enhance achievement of intended learning outcomes
Describe the utilities of learning analytics in enhancing learning effectiveness
Date
Session
Topics
5 May
Online Session 0
Online Session 1
E-learning Ecosystem: Setting the Scene
Interactive Online Learning: Getting Started
12 May
Face-to-Face Session A
(12pm – 2pm at HKU)
Creating Your Lecture Video
12 May
Online Session 2
Blended Learning: Teaching On-Campus
15 May
Online Session 3
Learning Analytics: Using Learner’s Data to Improve Teaching
Inter-professional team-based learning (IPTBL) is an innovative teaching approach which aims at promoting peer-to-peer learning and collaborations across disciplines. In 2016, the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine piloted IPTBL with nearly 600 medical, health and social care students from HKU and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. This year, the organizing team scaled it up to serve more than 1,000 students from the following programmes: Chinese medicine, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and social work from HKU; and medical laboratory science, nursing, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, radiography, and social work from PolyU.
The details of implementation are as follows:
Topic of Instructional Unit
Date
No. of participants
Anticoagulation Therapy
January 21, 2017
247
Depression
February 11, 2017
310
Fracture
February 18, 2017
437
Multiple drugs
February 25, 2017
347
Developmental delay
March 18, 2017
192
Cancer
March 25, 2017
501
What’s new this year?
(1) Venue: To facilitate group discussion and communication between teachers and students, IPTBL was conducted this year in Lecture Hall II at the Centennial Campus, a flat area with mobile chairs and strong WiFi connectivity.
Before: IPTBL was conducted in a lecture theatre setting in the 2016 pilot round. Students in groups tended to face the stage most of the time.
After: Groups were arranged in circles this year. This picture features 71 small groups of five to seven students seated in the spacious Lecture Hall II. The IPTBL team would like to thank colleagues from the Examinations Office, Estates Office and Learning Environment Services of ITS who made all the six sessions possible.
(2) Team progress chart: How to pace the 4-hour face-to-face IPTBL session is a big challenge. While the moderators and content experts had to be very conscious of the time, students also played an important role in moving the session forward. The newly added team progress chart displayed on one of the four screens in front of the hall, indicating whether a particular group had finished the assigned task – just like what a leaderboard does in online games. This provided motivation to students to complete their work in a timely manner, and also gave teachers some idea on which groups to interview in the interactive feedback session.
(3) Peer evaluation: Team-based learning creates many opportunities for students to learn with, from and about each other through intensive interaction and collaboration. During each session, they got to know each other’s expertise and communication style. Peer evaluation is a mechanism for them to provide honest feedback to their peer teammates in terms of four competencies: values/ ethics, roles/ responsibilities, communication, and teamwork. At the end of each session of this year’s IPTBL, students would fill in their peer evaluation scores in an online form. They would then be directed to another page which showed them, in real-time, the average scores that he/she received from other teammates.
Dr. LK Chan explained to students how to fill out the online peer evaluation form. By the way, did you notice the balloons in the picture? They indicate the group numbers so that teachers/ facilitators could quickly locate where the teams are.
Exemplary facilitation skills
Team-based learning incorporates many elements of constructivist learning (Hrynchak & Batty, 2012). The teachers (content experts) spent much time to come up with carefully-crafted application exercises which can reveal common misconceptions and debatable topics from which students build new understandings. During the interactive feedback session, many teachers showed excellent skills in facilitating the discussion of a large group of students, such as:
not picking the team leader to present the team’s views;
asking open-ended questions with a focus on understanding the students’ rationale in picking a particular answer;
encouraging students to articulate their thoughts;
addressing uncertainties or disagreements;
providing a closure after each discussion; and
paying attention to teams or students who are not taking part (e.g., by inviting a range of teams to give their opinions).
Way forward
The IPTBL team is now reviewing the feedback from students and teachers. They are thinking about improving the implementation in the following ways:
shortening the readiness tests in order to leave more time for discussion on the clinical scenario;
re-voicing students’ opinions when they contribute something that appears to be complex or not too well understood to students from other disciplines.
Adding new functions to the online platform for running IPTBL to provide more informative feedback to both the facilitators and students.
For those of you would like to learn more about IPTBL or contribute to it, please contact Dr. Fraide A. Ganotice, Jr., Program Coordinator at Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, via ganotc75@hku.hk. If you want to get to know the technical aspects of running large classes, you may reach out to the Technology-Enriched Learning Initiative (TELI) via enquiry@teli.hku.hk.
Look forward to IPTBL 2018!
Reference
Hrynchak, P. & Batty, H. (2012) The educational theory basis of team-based learning. Medical Teacher 34, 796-801.
Want to join learners from all around the world to learn about how Chinese philosophers view humanity and nature? Register this free online course at edX.
The course was very well received by learners in its previous two runs, and now the third run will begin on June 13 2017!
Highlights of the course
In the format of a dialogue, Chad Hansen, Chair Professor of Chinese Philosophy, Emeritus, HKU, analyzes and discusses the essence of Chinese philosophy from his unique perspectives
Various animations and visual aids were used in post-production of the lecture videos to further help students learn the course content
Knowledge check questions and learning activities designed to relate to student daily lives so learning is applicable
There are two things higher education institutions must do when guiding their students in learning. First, we should teach students how to transfer their critical thinking skills from one context to another. Second, we must engage students in active learning and deep processing to develop their capabilities.
Minerva is a non-conventional college startup where students live in seven world cities and interact with teachers and peers via live videos on an online platform in their four-year education. With its growing popularity and low admission rate, it is described by some as a college “tougher to get into than Harvard”. On 17 February 2017, Mr. Ben Nelson, Founder and CEO of the Minerva project shared his secrets of success in Minerva in a seminar titled “How to save higher education in twenty seven easy steps?” at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).
What should we teach?
Minerva believes that higher education institutions should teach students how to transfer their critical thinking skills from one context to another. Their teaching philosophy focuses on providing students with a framework of thinking applicable in different situations. Education is not meant to provide rote solutions, but ideas and patterns, so that when students encounter a novel situation, they can come up with a novel solution.
The fundamental problem in higher education is that we spent years learning things in an unstructured environment before we learn how to transfer. The goal of Minerva is to alter students’ way of thinking and interpreting the world. “It’s like doing brain surgery,” said Mr. Nelson. He agrees that studying in Minerva can be challenging, but by the 3rd or 4th year, students will have learnt how to parachute into any location and make the most out of any situation.
How should we teach?
We must engage students in active learning and deep processing instead of simply lecturing them because deep processing leads to better retention of knowledge. Mr. Nelson perceives passive lectures as an ineffective way to disseminate information as it does not encourage deep processing – students’ knowledge retention rate drops to 10% by the end of the 6th month, meaning a 90% failure rate.
Based on his examination of empirical evidence, he came to the conclusion that “when you go through deep processing, you get memory for free.” If you only push students to memorize something without going through deep processing, the retention rate will most likely be very low.
Higher education is “the gatekeeper between citizenry and leadership.” It is necessary for universities to keep up with changes, or else we may be in the peril of not existing.
A big thank you to HKUST for inviting us to join this thought-provoking seminar.
“[The] place where knowledge formation occurs is right at that edge where you do not know what’s going to happen. If you did, it would just be repetition, it wouldn’t be discovery […] students get very excited at that moment,” said Professor Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, Director of Common Core (CC), after Professor Ricky Kwok’s sharing on March 7, 2017 about his experience of flipping the course CCST9003 Everyday Computing and the Internet.
Last semester, Ricky and his course team began a new teaching and learning experiment. They have developed a series of videos to replace traditional lectures; and delivered 5 game-based workshops for students in their CC class (e.g., solving the Rubik’s cube, defusing bombs in a computer game, and solving encrypted codes). The main driver of the flipped approach was the dissatisfaction with the low energy level observed in lectures. “We (teachers) are just sending out sound waves that nobody cares to receive,” Ricky said.
Participants of the sharing session had to experience this new way of learning first-hand. Prior to the meet-up, they were asked to watch several video clips on “recursion”, one of the algorithms that Ricky taught in his course. When they came in, they had to “compete” in an online game powered by Kahoot to check their preparedness, followed by a team-based, hands-on activity of solving a recursion problem with lego pieces. While groups of students in the actual CC course need to produce a video on the solution by the end of the two-hour class as a deliverable, our teacher-participants were asked to explain their solution to Teaching Assistants within 10 minutes. Feel the adrenaline? That’s what Ricky meant by “learning begins at the end of your comfort zone”.
Ricky learnt from his own experience that the 4Cs – credit, collaboration, competition, and co-creation – were important in providing the motivation that students need. Here is his recipe:
Application in CCST9003
Advantage
Credit
All classwork activities counted towards students’ final grade.
Students had the incentive to participate in the first place.
Collaboration
It is one of the criteria in the grading rubrics. Every group member needs to participate and demonstrate collaboration.
Creates room for dialogue and peer-to-peer learning; where stronger students are motivated to help weaker students.
Competition
Each group competed with the 29 other groups in the class.
Competitive elements, e.g., the fastest and most accurate team wins, students can leave the class once they completed the task.
An essential element to push for and maintain a high energy level, competition is a good motivator for an individual to strive for the better.
Co-creation
A video had to be produced on the spot at the end of each class, showing how the solved the problem.
Learning by teaching is encouraged; students can have solid take-aways and a sense of satisfaction when leaving the classroom.
“Just enjoy that learning and don’t care about the marks,” one of the CCST9003 students said in the video interview done after the last classwork activity. Perhaps this is great testimony that all the hard work of Ricky and his team paid off at the end.
The Common Core continued to be a sandbox of experimentation of new pedagogies. This semester, Mr. Matthew Pryor is also flipping his CCHU9001 Designs on the Future: Sustainability of the Built Environment.
Last but not least, feel the beat of CCST 9003 through this video.
TELI looks forward to envisioning the use of space for teaching and learning with the Libraries and other members of the University. Please get in touch via enquiry@teli.hku.hk if you want to start a conversation.
Have you been in situations where your students lack knowledge on how to present and analyze data but your course contents are so packed that there’s no extra time to teach or elaborate further on how to use statistical tools? Yet, data analysis skills should not be overlooked, as it plays an important role across many disciplines.
The case of SCNC1111
The Science Foundation Course SCNC1111 Scientific Method and Reasoning encountered this situation. As part of their group project, the students of SCNC1111 have to make their own investigations into how Mathematics and Statistics can be or have been applied to daily life and scientific inquiry. Over the past years, the teaching team observed that while most students were good at data collection, some of them seemed to be at a loss on what to do with the data: What can the data help us to do?
Seeing that some students lack proper training in handling, interpreting or analyzing data, the SCNC1111 teaching team found it essential to fill the gap:
“As there is not enough time to cover all these in class time, [we] took the initiative to produce videos to introduce data analysis in a convenient and low-cost way. The animations in the videos can help to vividly illustrate the concerned points, and the University can keep a database of resources for students to use at their convenience.” – Dr. Eddy Lam, Dr. Rachel Lui and Dr. William Cheung, SCNC1111 Course instructors
As a result, several useful and efficient instructional videos have been developed on how to use free online resources to plot nice graphs and do basic statistical analysis. Students’ skills and learning experience can both be enhanced. With the hope to incorporate students into the process of teaching, the SCNC1111 teaching team has previously recruited senior undergraduates as Senior Tutors for the course and one of the Senior Tutors, Mr. Dag Wong, was in charge of the video production. The team believes that “students can be our resourceful partner in developing high quality teaching materials and videos.”
Interdisciplinary resource-sharing
These videos can prove to be useful not only in science, but also in different disciplines such as economics, psychology, engineering, sociology, to name a few. In the long run, such productions can initiate synergy among different faculties in developing and sharing educational resources in common areas of inquiry. As students are expected to learn a wide spectrum of skills, creation and utilization of interdisciplinary materials will be highly beneficial.
Here are some typical data analysis questions asked by students across the campus, to which the SCNC1111 team has responded through the videos. Please feel free to share these links with your students!
What if I have an equation and I simply want to plot a nice-looking graph?
What if I have gathered some data and I wonder if there is any relationship between them?
How does regression work?
How does linear regression work with excel?
Let this be a start to knowledge sharing across disciplines! Contact us if you are interested to learn more.
Organised by Technology-Enriched Learning Initiative (TELI)
Date : March 7, 2017 (Tuesday) Time : 12:45pm – 2pm Venue : Room 321, 3/F, Run Run Shaw Building (Main Campus) Speakers : Professor Ricky Kwok (Course Co-ordinator and Teacher), Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering Facilitators: Teaching Assistants – Ms. Yuqian Chai, Mr. Xiangyu Hou, Dr. Tyrone Kwok, Dr. Leon Lei (Chief), Mr. Victor Wong; Course Manager – Mr. Donn Gonda Respondent: Professor Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, Director of Common Core Curriculum
The Common Core Curriculum Committee granted approval for running CCST 9003 – Everyday Computing and the Internet in the Scientific and Technological Literacy Area of Inquiry – as a Small Private Online Course (SPOC) in the first semester of 2016-17. Traditional in-class lecture materials were replaced by video recordings and other online learning materials, leaving more time for interactions in face-to-face sessions. For those of you who would like to know more about what happened, please sign up for this sharing session. The teacher-in-charge and TAs will show you how the course was re-designed, what in-class activities were used, and perhaps most importantly – the pains and pleasures of running this SPOC.
Please note that participants are required to watch a few short videos and send in some questions before coming to the face-to-face sharing. They will also be given hands-on exercises during the 75-minute session (so, we are serving light refreshment). Come prepared.
To celebrate the launch of the first MOOC on dinosaur in Asia, our course instructor, Dr. Michael Pittman, hosted a party with Professor Yongqiang Zong, Head of Department of Earth Sciences and Professor Ricky Kwok, Associate Vice-President (Teaching and Learning) on February 8th, 2017. Almost 50 HKU colleagues and members of the general public celebrated this happy occasion with us at Stephen Hui Geological Museum.
Full house! Thank you for coming!
(Up left) Dr. Michael Pittman, (Up right) Professor Yongqiang Zong, (Bottom) Professor Ricky Kwok
Young Dinosaur Lovers
Dr. Pittman also took this opportunity to congratulate winners of “The Year of the Dinosaur” Drawing Competition and meet young dinosaur lovers in the community.
The drawing competition award goes to:
It was a delight to meet so many young faces passionate about dinosaurs and learning!
In December last year, we were excited to take over 200 local secondary students on the adventurous trip of our first SPOC – Critical Readings of Popular Culture! In the six-week self-paced course, students planned their learning sequence and schedule by themselves. They watched the required learning units to acquire the knowledge and skills needed, completed knowledge check quizzes to assess their understanding, and submitted their own critical analysis with reference to their own learning experience. More importantly, they were actively sharing their ideas with fellow learners in the discussion forums, supporting each other’s learning experience.
Watching all of these happening, we are proud to say: you are ready for university studies!
The course will launch again in May, with more up to date popular work introduced. Stay tuned with us and establish your critical thinking by viewing day-to-day popular culture works through new perspectives.
In the meantime, don’t miss out on two upcoming SPOCs from HKU: – Journey into Madness and Everyday Computing, launching on Mar 1st and 8th respectively.
Get ready for your future study, starting from HKU SPOCs. Register today!
Eligibility: Enrollment is only open for Secondary School Students.
Everyday Computing
This course aims to describe and explain various computational algorithms (e.g., Recursion, Google Map route finding, etc.). It will also help you in evaluating the pros and cons of computing services. At the end of the course, you will demonstrate your learning through a series of activities that will be held in a face-to-face session. This course will cover topics such as, divide and conquer, graphs, cryptography, and authentication protocols.
Journey into madness
Mental illness is often portrayed by mass media as a threat. But how much do we really know about mental illness? Mental health is fundamental to our overall well-being and influences us far more than we’d like to admit. This course will guide you through the considerations of defining abnormality and challenging the stigma attached to mental disorders. With the use of case studies and video lectures, you will gain a broadened understanding of those who struggle with mental illnesses.
This 15-day course will lead you through design considerations and implementation skills for e-learning at three different scales.
You will:
