As HKU03x Humanity and Nature in Chinese Thought is drawing to a close, we are going to round up the journey with an exciting online debate! You can join us in the audience simply by clicking on YouTube.
As remarked by course instructor Professor Chad Hansen, ‘For a teacher, it is a big change getting to know most of you by “handles” on your posts and [be] awed by the global reach and diversity of our online community.’ This debate goes in line with our dedication to achieving extensive global reach, while keeping the high-touch personalized interaction that you would expect in traditional classroom teaching.
Debaters from around the world will present their arguments on the topic
“We should follow the social conventions of our society”, followed by comments and summary by Professor Chad Hansen.
Date: August 15, 2015 (Saturday)
Time: 22:00 HKT / 14:00 UTC
Language: English
Click the above link and then choose the YouTube live stream: HKU03x Online Debate: We should follow the social conventions of our society.
Depending on your YouTube time zone setting, you will see “Watch the live stream!” and the time of the event, with the number of hours left to the debate underneath.
Contribute to the live chat on your right and share with us your thoughts during the debate!
Let the countdown begin and we are looking forward to meeting you online.
Don’t miss out on the grand finale of our first MOOC in Philosophy!
South China Morning Post recently interviewed our teachers on how e-learning has taken off at HKU and will bring unprecedented learning experience to learners both on and off campus. The first MOOC, an introductory public health course entitled Epidemics, showcased the University’s strength in the global context, and was “hugely successful”.
The initiative turned out to be headlights into how online learning can be widely and effectively incorporated into on-campus education. The article highlighted the valuable statistics collected from MOOCs. Leveraging a treasure of both quantitative and qualitative data collected from an impressive number of MOOC learners, teachers were able to evaluate and refine course materials and assessments, which can then be repurposed for their on-campus counterparts, laying the groundwork for “flipped classroom” teaching.
The data also provided insights into how some e-learning tools for on-campus students can be improved. For example, compared to the underused Moodle online forum, the MOOC discussion forums encouraged students to ask questions in a comfortable way since they allowed a certain level of anonymity.
Drawing on the Chinese philosophical concepts developed in the course, six debaters coming from around the world will discuss the topic “We should follow the social conventions of our society” from the affirmative and negative perspectives. Course instructor Professor Chad Hansen will adjudicate the debate and summarize the ideas presented.
Details of the debate:
Date: August 15, 2015 (Saturday) Time: 22:00 HKT / 14:00 UTC Language: English
Organized by e-learning Pedagogical Support Unit, CETL
Speaker: Dr. Jingli Cheng, e-learning Pedagogical Support Unit Date : 13 August, 2015 (Thursday) Time : 12:45pm – 2:00pm Venue : Room 321, Run Run Shaw Building
Abstract:
Communities of practice as an approach to informal learning has received attention from various types of organizations, including higher education institutions. A fundamental process underlying successful communities of practice is knowledge sharing. Yet, empirical understanding of motivations for knowledge sharing is lacking, especially with regard to an important subset of participants in these communities, the experts. Based on a research study that the speaker conducted with Google and Symantec, this presentation will highlight the key factors that motivated expert participants’ knowledge sharing behaviors in the two companies’ online user communities.
Colleagues who are considering implementing communities of practice or knowledge sharing initiatives in and beyond their organizations may get useful insights from this presentation. Teachers who are thinking about motivating student participation in online communities may also find this workshop beneficial. All are welcome.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Jingli Cheng has extensive experience applying instructional design theories and best practices in various organizational settings to help learners improve their knowledge and skills. Before joining HKU’s e-learning Pedagogical Support Unit, he worked as Instructional Designer at Stanford University, the Hewlett Packard company and several other organizations in the United States. His research interests include motivation for knowledge sharing in online communities and informal learning in organizational settings.
Speaker: Dr. Jingli Cheng, e-learning Pedagogical Support Unit Date : 9 July, 2015 (Thursday) Time : 12:45pm – 2:00pm Venue : Room 321, Run Run Shaw Building
Abstract:
How Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are changing the higher education landscape is much talked about in academic and popular writings, yet for professors, designers and support staff of MOOCs, very little exists that serves as practical guidance for design, production and implementation of MOOCs.
In May 2015, the University of Hong Kong successfully concluded a Massive Open Online Course on the topic of vernacular architecture. A rigorous design, production and implementation process was key to the success of this course. In this presentation, Dr. Jingli Cheng, lead instructional designer and project manager of the MOOC, will share experience, best practice, and lessons learned through the project.
Go behind the scene and learn about the essential elements that led to a successful MOOC!
About the Speaker:
Dr. Jingli Cheng has extensive experience applying instructional design theories and best practices in various organizational settings to help learners improve their knowledge and skills. Before joining the HKU’s e-learning Pedagogical Support Unit, he worked as Instructional Designer at Stanford University, the Hewlett Packard company and several other organizations in the United States. His research interests include motivation for knowledge sharing in online communities and informal learning in organizational settings.
Philosophy can be a daunting subject to teach, as it often involves the explanation of complex and abstract ideas, and encouraging students to think creatively and independently. The challenge becomes more pronounced in the context of online teaching, where students learn remotely and independently in front of their own computers. How do you engage the students and maintain their attention span, while doing justice to the intellectual depth of the subject? Such was the challenge we faced when we produced HKU03x Humanity and Nature in Chinese Thought.
Course Instructor Professor Chad Hansen is a brilliant philosophy teacher. His lectures are always intellectually challenging and interesting at the same time. So how did we turn his course into a MOOC? At first we tried the traditional method of asking the teacher to speak directly into a teleprompter, as if addressing the viewers himself. The result was not bad, but that could not capture the dynamic and engaging character that his lectures are well known for – something was missing.
So the production team tried a new and risky method – we put Professor Hansen in a small classroom setting and surrounded him with real students and cameras. We shot it like a mini-concert in order to capture his signature performance. We also spent weeks talking to Professor Hansen and the course team learning about the subject matter, and then got our graphic designer to design some interesting and relevant visuals to present those abstract philosophy concepts. And the result was great.
This balance between education and entertainment is a hard one to strike. And we hope, with this new attempt, we will be able to make the teaching of abstract subjects as informative, enlightening, and enjoyable as possible. And we cordially invite you to take part in this.
Speaker: Dr. Una-May O’Reilly, Principal Research Scientist, AnyScale Learning For All Group, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Date : 16 June, 2015 (Tuesday) Time : 12:45pm – 2:00pm Venue : Room 321, Run Run Shaw Building
Abstract:
Understanding why students stopout will help in understanding how students learn in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). In this seminar, Dr. Una-May O’Reilly will describe how she and her research group build accurate predictive models of MOOC student stopout via a scalable, prediction methodology, end to end, from raw source data to model analysis. They attempted to predict stopout for the Fall 2012 offering of MIT’s 6.002x.
This involved the meticulous and crowd-sourced engineering of over 25 predictive features extracted for thousands of students, the creation of temporal and non-temporal data representations for use in predictive modeling, the derivation of over 10 thousand models with a variety of state-of-the-art machine learning techniques and the analysis of feature importance by examining over 70,000 models. They found that stopout prediction is a tractable problem. Their models achieved an AUC (receiver operating characteristic area-under-the-curve) as high as 0.95 (and generally 0.88) when predicting one week in advance. Even with more difficult prediction problems, such as predicting stop out at the end of the course with only one weeks’ data, the models attained AUCs of ~0.7.
About the Speakers:
Dr. Una-May O’Reilly (http://people.csail.mit.edu/unamay/) leads the AnyScale Learning For All (ALFA) group (http://groups.csail.mit.edu/ALFA) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ALFA focuses on scalable machine learning, evolutionary algorithms, and frameworks for knowledge mining, prediction and analytics. She received the EvoStar Award for Outstanding Achievements in Evolutionary Computation in Europe in 2013 and serves as Vice-Chair of ACM Special Interest Group for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (SIGEVO).
Organized by e-learning Pedagogical Support Unit, CETL
Speaker: Professor Curtis Bonk (Professor of Instructional Systems Technology, Indiana University) Date : 5 June, 2015 (Friday) Time : 12:45pm – 2:00pm Venue : Room 321, Run Run Shaw Building (registration is capped at 60 due to room capacity)
During the past few years, learning has become increasingly collaborative, global, mobile, modifiable, open, online, blended, massive, visually-based, hands-on, ubiquitous, instantaneous, and personal. This is the age of Education 3.0 where learning is about playful and highly engaged design where learner creation of products is the new norm, often with the use of digital media. We humans tinker, invent, and express ourselves, and we find meaning in our playful pursuits. Fortunately, we are living in an age of educational resource abundance where passion, play, purpose, and freedom to learn take precedence over the more mind-numbing traditional information reception models of learning.
Instructors and experts are most effective as curators, counselors, consultants, concierges, and cultivators of student learning. These are the new instructional “C” words; gone are words like learning coercion, credit management, and fixed notions of correctness. Education 3.0 instructors are the ones who foster students’ autonomy and self-directed learning pursuits while, simultaneously, offering insightful guides and timely scaffolds where and when appropriate.
Attend this talk and find out how Education 3.0 will impact instructors and students, and how, in turn, we all can significantly impact it.
About the Speakers:
Dr. Curtis Bonk is Professor of Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University. A prolific author and internationally known speaker, he has published more than 300 articles and books on e-learning and has given more than 1,200 talks on many topics related to learning technologies and human learning.
Dr. Bonk received the CyberStar Award from the Indiana Information Technology Association, the Most Outstanding Achievement Award from the US Distance Learning Association, and the Most Innovative Teaching in a Distance Education Program Award from the State of Indiana. From 2012 to 2015, Bonk was named annually by Education Next and listed in Education Week among the top contributors to the public debate about education from more than 20,000 university-based academics. In 2014, he also was named the recipient of the Mildred B. and Charles A. Wedemeyer Award for Outstanding Practitioner in Distance Education.
Abstract This lecture will discuss how Berkeley has been performing relative to its MOOC goals: what has worked well, what they perhaps should have done differently or what they wish they were doing better, what challenges they face next, how MOOCs have affected classroom learning and teaching, and what their future might be at Berkeley. They continue to believe that the new momentum in online education is a strategic and permanent change for universities, even if that change ultimately takes a very different form than what the original MOOC creators envisioned.
Date: May 26, 2015 (Tuesday) Time: 6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. Venue: Lecture Theatre A, Chow Yei Ching Building, The University of Hong Kong,
Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong Speaker: Professor Armando Fox Charge: Free registration
About the Speaker
Armando Fox is a Professor in Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences Department and the Faculty Advisor to the UC Berkeley MOOCLab. With his colleague David Patterson, he co-designed and co-taught Berkeley’s first Massive Open Online Course on “Engineering Software as a Service”, offered through edX, through which over 10,000 students in over 120 countries have earned certificates of completion. He also serves on edX’s Technical Advisory Committee, helping to set the technical direction of their open MOOC platform. His current research in online education includes automatic grading of students’ computer programs for style and improving engagement and learning outcomes in MOOCs.
Those interested in attending are requested to register online before noon, May 22, 2015.
For inquiries, please contact us by email at enggfac@hkucc.hku.hk or by phone at 2859 2803.
