The Jurassic Park franchise has successfully made dinosaurs a popular Hollywood theme and merchandise. Yet, these striking giants are more than animated sculptures – they are a key factor in the evolutionary chain that deserves serious research effort. For this reason, Dr. Michael Pittman from the Department of Earth Sciences produced Hong Kong’s first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on geology, dinosaurs and evolution, starts on 8 February 2017 on edX.

One important reason for studying dinosaur is that their descendants might still be living among us. Dr. Pittman is devoted to proving that birds, the feathered animal we see day in day out, are a type of carnivorous dinosaur. If successful, it would be a breakthrough in our understanding of the physical evolution of birds, for example, how they make sounds and how they assemble their bodies to fly. The evolutionary links between dinosaurs and birds is also what enabled the Jurassic Park producers to simulate the sound of the dinosaurs in the film “because their larynx (vocal box) looks quite similar to their closest relatives – birds,” Dr. Pittman elaborated in an interview for timeout.com.hk.

Another purpose for producing a dinosaur MOOC in Hong Kong is to properly capture the dinosaur fever in the city. As a Hong Kong raised Londoner, Dr. Pittman finds it unfortunate that palaeontology is not a popular subject in Hong Kong despite people’s immense enthusiasm in dinosaurs. For instance, over a million people visited the Legends of the Giant Dinosaurs exhibition held at the Hong Kong Science Museum last year. As the only dinosaur expert in Hong Kong, Dr. Pittman feels that it is his responsibility to open up more channels for dinosaur enthusiasts in Hong Kong to explore the palaeontology field. Against this backdrop, Dr. Pittman teamed up with Professor Xu Xing of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Beijing, to produce Hong Kong’s first ever MOOC on dinosaur.

To give MOOC takers a real taste of the environment that housed the Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Tyrannosaurus rex and others, many of the MOOC lectures were filmed in the Gobi Desert in northern China. The dinosaur hunters also examined samples of fossil and ancient rocks to reconstruct the ecosystem that nurtured dinosaurs. The key is to vividly present this ancient animal before viewers’ eyes. “It takes a lot of work to get the MOOC into an attractive video format, so having a strong inspiration for it was very important,” said Dr. Pittman.

Hopefully, with more palaeontology enthusiasts and new fossil discoveries, future Hollywood blockbusters on dinosaurs will bear a closer resemblance to what actually happened over 150 million years ago.

Click here to read the full article on timeout.com.hk.

MOOC and on-campus teaching crossover has always been the ultimate goal for MOOC teachers and instructional designers. Recently, Dr. Masato Kajimoto has repurposed his MOOC Making Sense of News for teaching an Undergraduate course. We are happy to recount the experience and analyze students’ response via an edX blog. Learn more about his experience here.

Organized by Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL), E-learning Pedagogical Support Unit (EPSU) and Technology-Enriched Learning Initiative (TELI)

About the Joint Workshop

Many teachers who are planning to flip their classes might agree that moving traditional lectures online is an effective way to deliver instructional materials. More importantly, it can also make room for quality interactions between teachers and students. However, after the flip, what kind of learning opportunities can we create to engage, inspire, provoke, or even shock our students in the face-to-face sessions, the “face time”? How should face time and screen time be meaningfully blended? In this workshop, you will hear cases of flipped classes in different disciplines, analyze the key elements of the pedagogical strategies used in face time, identify the activities that you might be able to use, and come away with initial plans for a flipped class. Be sure to bring your wireless device and a lesson that you are considering flipping to work on!

This workshop is open to the first 42 registered participants to ensure that there is enough time to accommodate questions, provide comments, and give feedback for each participant.

Registration

For enquiries, please contact Miss Bonnie Yu by email yka0201@hku.hk.

Workshop video

Developing small private online courses (SPOC) is an increasingly popular teaching strategy in higher education. On January 26th, TELI’s SPOC team organized an interactive workshop offering participants a rare opportunity to gain hands-on experience in creating a video that can serve as an online lecture.

One clear advantage of restructuring a lecture into a series of short online videos is portability across time and space – it allows students to learn anytime, anywhere. Students are free to pause and review sections of the videos, which is not possible in traditional lectures. Condensing a two-hour lecture into short videos of about 6 minutes each also tend to be more engaging.

While creating an online course may seem a daunting task, it can actually be done by following a simple three-step approach: revisiting the course structure, storyboarding and scripting, then studio filming. At the workshop, a mock-up filming studio was set up to give our participants a taste of video production. They were invited to draft a short script in groups and speak in front of the camera and a green or blue screen that can be chroma-keyed into any background that you like. The responses were positive overall. Participants commented that this experience made them “feel much more comfortable when someone tells [them] ‘let’s shoot a video’” and “it’s doable.”

The recordings were edited by our team and sent to individual participants after the workshop.

It is TELI’s mission to provide technological support to teachers in creating online videos and e-learning materials. We are re-running this interactive workshop in March – please contact us​ to schedule your session.

Seminar video: Professor Ricky Kwok

Seminar video: Dr. Masato Kajimoto

Dr. Masato Kajimoto from Journalism and Media Studies Centre joined us again on January 14, 2016 to continue his story on integrating a MOOC into on-campus teaching. Dr. Kajimoto’s MOOC “Making Sense of News” was launched last year and was subsequently repurposed to flip 5 lectures out of 13 for his on-campus course. The experiment provided new insights into how MOOC and on-campus teaching can supplement each other.

Although producing a MOOC takes more effort than face-to-face (F2F) lecturing because every single word in the video has to be scripted, Dr. Kajimoto pointed out that having a solid script helped him realize how repetitive on-campus lectures are and how time in class can be better spent. He pointed out that flipping lectures resulted in better activities engagement and quality of discussion as students had much more time and motivation to prepare for tutorials. This observation was backed up by the semester-end student survey, which showed that students enjoyed the blended mode of learning. Over 76% indicated that the online lectures enabled them to better manage their study time and facilitated their preparation for the tutorial discussions and exercises. When asked whether they would prefer solely F2F lectures, over 62% disagreed. It exemplified that “MOOC and on-campus teaching can help each other,” in Dr. Kajimoto’s own words.

In the process of repurposing his MOOC, Dr. Kajimoto beefed up the contents with additional readings and local examples. He even incorporated ideas and examples submitted by his MOOC students into his on-campus online teaching materials, facilitating inter-cultural knowledge exchange. Professor Chan Yuen-ying, director of HKU’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre, is also keen on taking advantage of HKU’s position as an international knowledge exchange hub to roll out more MOOCs, particularly in the field of Asian Journalism. “The idea is that if you want to learn about China…[and] you want to learn about Asia on this subject, you come to us.”

To echo Dr. Kajimoto’s comment, Professor Ricky Kwok, Associate Vice-President (Teaching and Learning) also agrees that MOOC and on-campus teaching are complementary. He said the best way to do a MOOC is a step-by-step transition, from flipping a few on-campus lectures, then scaling up to a SPOC, and finally developing a MOOC to face the world. He is happy to see that more and more young teaching advocates are embracing technology to scale up the quality of teaching. He is excited to work with more colleagues and scale out the innovative pedagogies.

Making Sense of News will be re-launched on edX In February 2016. Enroll now!