Motivations for experts’ knowledge sharing in online communities: What can we learn from Google and Symantec

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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.

Please send enquiries to Miss Cherry Lai
Email: cherry.lai@hku.hk.

CITE Seminar by Dr. Bei Yu & Dr. Jun Wang, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University, USA

Message from Centre for Information Technology in Education within the Faculty of Education

CITE Seminar Series 2015/2016

Seminar 1
Title: Automated Citation Opinion Analysis for Scientific Writing

Date: 17 July 2015 (Friday)
Time: 12:45 pm – 2:00 pm
Venue: Room 101, 1/F., Runme Shaw Building, The University of Hong Kong
Speaker: Dr. Bei Yu, Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University, USA
Chair: Dr. Xiao Hu, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Education, HKU

About the Seminar
With the fast growth of academic publications, researchers face the increasingly difficult task of comprehensive literature review. Current bibliographic databases provide citation linkages but no further citation context analysis to help researchers find the most relevant citations and organize different kinds of academic opinions expressed in citation context. The Citation Opinion Retrieval and Analysis (CORA) project aims for building an automated tool that can extract the citation statements, separate substantial citations from perfunctory ones, and categorize substantial citation opinions by their purposes, topic aspects, polarities, and the opinion holders and targets. CORA is expected to save researchers a significant amount of time to find the most useful comments from a large number of citations. CORA will also provide a new, qualitative approach for assessing research impact and tracking problematic phenomena such as citation bias.

For more details about the Speaker & registration, please visit
http://www.cite.hku.hk/news.php?id=543&category=seminar

Seminar 2
Title: DoodleBook: A New Tool for Science Education

Date: 17 July 2015 (Friday)
Time: 2:00 pm – 3:15 pm
Venue: Room 101, 1/F., Runme Shaw Building, The University of Hong Kong
Speaker: Dr. Jun Wang, Research Scientist, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University, USA
Chair: Dr. Xiao Hu, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Education, HKU

About the Seminar
There is growing evidence to show that drawing to learn, a visual and constructive learning strategy, is both engaging and effective. Emerging research is now suggesting that drawing should be recognized alongside writing, reading, and speaking as a key element in science education. This talk will present our recent work on drawing to learn in science (www.doodlebook.org). Developed with funding from the National Academies, DoodleBook serves two goals: (1) to make science more accessible and engaging through art; (2) to provide science students and educators, from kindergarten to college, with a free online space to create, collaborate, and share their own digital drawings. We will present our findings on how art students create drawings for scientific concepts, and how science teachers and students use the web tool in their classes.

For more details about the Speaker & registration, please visit
http://www.cite.hku.hk/news.php?id=544&category=seminar

Archiving 2013/14 Moodle courses – remove any copyrighted materials by July 15, 2015

Dear Moodle Course Teachers,

To enhance performance of our learning management system, old Moodle courses will have to be offloaded to the Archive System. On July 15, 2015, all Moodle courses from the academic year 2013/14 (i.e., course code ended with “_2013”) will be frozen to initiate this moving process.

There are two pertinent issues that I would like to draw your attention to:

(1) To comply with section 41A(5) of the Copyright Ordinance, teachers should remove all copyrighted materials on their Moodle courses after 12 months of their uploading.
(2) Teachers will have “read-only” access to their respective archived courses for education purposes (e.g., to prepare for the next offering). They will not be able to make any changes to the content of the archived courses. Besides, students will have “read-only” access to the archived courses.
More details about the Archive System are shown in the FAQ section of the Moodle Resources Website http://moodle-support.hku.hk (click here to visit the FAQ).

If you would like to opt out of the archiving arrangement with good reasons, please send an email with detailed information about your course to eLearningTeam@hku.hk on or before July 15, 2015. Thank you.

Best Regards,
CP Lau
eLearning Team
Information Technology Services

e-learning News from EPSU – June 2015

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Recent MOOC Developments at HKU

The HKU Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) initiative continues its momentum. In addition to the successful conclusion of HKU02.1x: The Search for Vernacular Architecture of Asia, the E-learning Pedagogical Support Unit (EPSU) is working with the course teams on designing and running a few other MOOCs:

You can register for these HKU MOOCs at edx.org.

Recording available: Knowledge Gained from the First HKU MOOC

From September to December 2014, HKU’s first MOOC, HKU01x Epidemics, ran on the edX platform. Over 10,000 learners enrolled in the course. HKU01x course teachers and EPSU conducted a seminar titled Broadening Horizons: Knowledge gained, experiences shared and lessons learned from HKU’s first MOOC HKU01x Epidemics, in which the speakers explored various viewpoints arising from the course. The recorded seminar can be viewed here.

Selected Video Resources for E-learning

Hands-On Workshops on Moodle and Panopto Unison

A new function, Panopto Unison, is now available. Panopto Unison module allows teachers to upload their existing video files in other formats to the Panopto system and share the uploaded video with the students in a Moodle course.

A new hands-on workshop PAN-004 “Share existing video to a Moodle course using Panopto Unison” is scheduled among other workshops on Learning Management System (LMS) – Moodle and Lecture Capture Service (LCS) – Panopto. Details of workshops can be found in the online training schedule.

E-learning Consultancy

EPSU works closely with Faculties, Departments, programme teams and teachers on various e-learning initiatives, including flipped classroom, online learning modules and technology-enhanced assessment as well as analytics-informed course planning. For more information, please contact Ms Trudi Chan (Phone: 2241 5282; Email: trudi@hku.hk.)

EPSU Seminar – How to design, produce, and run a MOOC with confidence

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Organized by e-learning Pedagogical Support Unit, CETL

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.

Please send enquiries to Miss Carmen Cheung
Email: carmen.cheung@hku.hk.

The Making of Humanity and Nature in Chinese Thought

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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.

> Check out our course trailer and previews   > Enroll now

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Moodle Archive System for 2013-14 courses

Dear Moodle Course Teachers,

Moodle has been in place to support the University’s electronic teaching and learning since 2011. It is a good practice to offload the old courses to the Moodle Archive System to release the loading and storage on the production server for better performance.

ITS will move all Moodle courses of the academic year 2013-14 (i.e. course code ended with “_2013”) from the production Moodle system to the Archive System in the middle of July 2015. The Moodle courses being archived will be frozen on 3 July 2015 for moving.

After the move, students, teachers and course administrators still have the “Read-only” access to these archived courses via the “My eLearning” tab of HKU Portal. “Read-only” means that users could not change course contents nor make any submissions to assignments or forums. More details about the Archive System are shown at the FAQ section of the Moodle Resources website (click here to visit).

If there are good reasons that your courses should not be moved to the Archive System this July, please send us email with detailed information to eLearningTeam@hku.hk on or before 30 June 2015. Thank you for your attention.

Best Regards,

CP Lau
eLearning Team
Information Technology Services

EPSU Seminar – Predicting Stopout in MOOCS: Mining Behavioral Data

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Organized by e-learning Pedagogical Support Unit, CETL

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).

Miss Carmen Cheung
Email: carmen.cheung@hku.hk.

CITE & Faculty of Education Joint Seminar – Measuring attitudes and dispositions of digital age learners

Message from Centre for Information Technology in Education within the Faculty of Education

CITE Seminar Series 2015/2016

CITE & Faculty of Education Joint Seminar – Measuring attitudes and dispositions of digital age learners

Date: 3 June 2015 (Wednesday)
Time: 12:45 pm – 2:00 pm
Venue: Room 101, 1/F., Runme Shaw Building, The University of Hong Kong
Speaker: Dr. Gerald Knezek, Regents Professor of Learning Technologies, University of North Texas, USA
Chair: Prof. Nancy Law, Professor, Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong

About the Seminar
Attitudes and dispositions are affective (feeling) components of human perception, rather than cognitive (thinking) or behavioral (taking action) human domains. They are important because they influence the acceptance and use of technologies as well the motivation to learn. We bother with procedures to ensure accurate assessment of attitudes and dispositions ultimately for accountability of impact. A government, school system, or other publicly funded entity wishes to know what is being accomplished with the funds allocated. Attitudes can be changed relatively quickly while changing a student’s general level of achievement takes much longer. Over time positive attitudinal changes lead to higher achievement. These concepts are central to digital age learning.

Research has shown strong links between pupils’ attitudes and the effect on information technology use and learning. Unfortunately, technology changes very fast, so studies must keep up with the current times and also look to the future. In just one decade the emphasis in many countries has shifted from having students perform well on standardized achievement tests to “happiness indices” and nurturing interest in science, technology, engineering, an math (STEM) from an early age. We must anticipate the day when major studies will focus on attitudes and dispositions related to transformations “in the cloud” or in social networking environments. Already emerging are studies of attitudes and dispositions toward mobile devices for informal learning and toward 1-to-1 devices in formal education. There is much work that remains to be done in these areas. This seminar will focus on instruments and techniques for assessing attitudes and disposition toward IT in education, and introduce models for assessing impact on outcomes important to society

About the Speaker
Dr. Knezek’s research interests include measuring attitudes and dispositions toward information technology, developing and testing formal models of technology integration, developing practical research designs, and refining scaling methods and techniques. He is Director of the Institute for the Integration of Technology into Teaching & Learning (IITTL) at UNT and immediate Past President of the Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education (SITE). He was a Founder of the American Educational Research Association Special Interest Group on Technology as an Agent of Change in Teaching and Learning (TACTL SIG). He is Lead Principal Investigator for a U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovative Technologies project Going Green! Middle Schoolers Out to Save the World (NSF #1312168), a four-year scale-up expanding five years of initial funding (MSOSW, NSF #0833706) aimed at enhancing middle school student interest in STEM content and careers. He is Co-Principal Investigator for an NSF-funded Digital Fabrication project conducted at UNT in collaboration with the University of Virginia and Cornell University (Fab@School, NSF #1030865) featuring the development of engineering design skills at the upper elementary school level. He was previously Co-Principal Investigator for a U.S. Fund for Improvement for Post-Secondary Education project titled simMentoring (#P116B060398, 2007-2010) as well as an NSF Research in Disabilities grant featuring the placement of virtual students with disabilities in dynamic, online simulator or teachers (2009-11). His most recent funding in the strand of games and simulations for teaching and learning was serving as Co-PI on the umbrella grant and lead PI on the local UNT award from Gates/EDUCAUSE to expand the user base of simSchool worldwide to 10,000.

Please register at
http://www.cite.hku.hk/news.php?id=542&category=seminar