Seminar by Technology-Enriched Learning Initiative

About the Speaker

Professor Benson Yeh Ping-Cheng, Director of MOOC Program at National Taiwan University, is a pioneer in designing and experimenting new pedagogical initiatives. His award-winning educational social game, PaGamO, is a breakthrough in gamification. Based on this initiative, Professor Yeh started BoniO, a software production house with investment from the Foxconn Technology Group. Professor Yeh believes that education in the future lies in gaming and that every generation should have their own story of entrepreneurship.

About the Seminar
In this seminar, Professor Yeh will share his experience in writing his own story of entrepreneurship in order to encourage teenagers to go for their dreams. The setting up of BoniO was out of two major intentions. By recruiting mostly young graduates in the team, Professor Yeh aims to allow teenagers to have hands-on experience with entrepreneurship. He aspires to ignite the passion and courage in the next generation to put their business plans into action. Another purpose of BoniO is to make an impact on education; more specifically in the mode of learning. He believes that education of the next generation has to be closely tied to gaming; and in order to provide sustainable and easily applicable tools for teachers in gamifying educational contents, it is essential to start up a business.

Turnitin is one of the tools available for students and teachers to determine the originality of their work. The originality report is a document provided by Turnitin to demonstrate the similarity between students’ original written coursework and Turnitin databases, including books, journals, websites, past submissions, etc. A general similarity score as well as a detailed breakdown are included in the report for instructors to judge the originality of the students’ work.

The similarity score shows how much matching text has been found in the students’ writing. However, while it provides a direct overview of the originality, the score itself cannot be used as a criterion for determining plagiarism. The score could be rather high if the writing includes a large amount of proper citations or quotations, while it could also be rather low when the content is simply made up without any references. Therefore, judgment has to be made by an academic based on the detailed report. Any matching text against the databases would be highlighted with sources listed in the match overview section. Besides the matching text, links to the original full text are also available to help examiners make better informed judgments.

Even though Turnitin’s originality report is not necessarily a plagiarism report, it serves as an efficient aid to avoid plagiarism. Instructors could choose to make the report accessible for students, so that they could perform a self-check before the assignments are officially handed in. Alternatively the report can also be made accessible after the submission of assignment so students can reflect and examine on the score of their coursework. This accessibility enables students to build up the good habit of making proper references in academic writing. On the other hand, by setting up an acceptable percentage of similarity, instructors could make use of Turnitin to ensure the originality of students’ writing.

Are you interested in film production? Have you ever thought of being a videographer, a lighting technician, or even a director of your own film to tell a story worth sharing? Leaving their comfort zones and intensive study schedules, students from the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine took up the challenge of preparing a series of videos on basic life support skills (some of which are very similar to first-aid procedures), with the first two that went into production being compression-only CPR and choking management.

Led by the Emergency Medicine Unit (EMU) of the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine and in collaboration with the Technology-Enhanced Learning Initiative (TELI), our medical students participated in a filming tutorial session on August 19 and had their first trial of filming on October 26, 2015. Taught by a professional multimedia specialist lined up by TELI, the students picked up plentiful useful skills in filming such as transforming a set of medical procedures into practicable storyboards, acting naturally in front of the camera, and synchronizing audio and video in the post-production phase. Each student played a special role in the video making process, and their enthusiasm made the filming night a fun and memorable experience.

Moreover, this experience gave students a chance to share their knowledge in emergency medicine in layman’s terms through easy-to-understand yet informative videos. The steps that a rescuer takes during the first few minutes of a medical emergency are critical and can mean a difference between life and death. Therefore, offering these videos of basic life support skills are definitely important.

Filming will continue in the coming months. The whole series will be for both teaching and publicity. The elderly group has been identified as the major target audience. Stay tuned for more news about this project.

On September 22 and October 20, 2015, the Technology-Enriched Learning Initiative (TELI) team facilitated an extraordinary “flipped-classroom” learning experience for the students in Professor Rick Glofcheski’s Tort Law class. The idea was to provoke their initiative in discussion of authentic legal issues.

To “flip” the classroom is to mobilise the classroom time to the greatest, that is to reserve as much time as possible for interaction among students. Before the large-group meet-up, short videos were prepared to consolidate students’ knowledge on legal principles, with each video covering a key concept.

In groups of five, students were seated in Loke Yew Hall. They analysed news articles as if they were analysing a live case in front of them. Discussion was completely student-led. Tutors simply observed group discussions and supplemented their ideas at times.

One interesting touch to the ‘Flipped Classroom’ was the use of Mentimeter, an online polling system. Students were invited to answer several questions online anonymously after watching the video lectures as well as to provide justifications for their answers. The answers were then shown at the beginning of the large-group class. In this way both students and tutors got a better understanding of common misunderstandings that might be incurred when learning about the topic.

It was extremely rewarding to the team to hear that students and tutors cherished this experience and were looking forward to more. Students pointed out that unlike tutorials, they really do engage in a discussion with one another. Tutors also believed that by not “dictating” the classroom, students were allowed more spaces for discussions, and would eventually benefit from them.

Dr. Masato Kajimoto’s MOOC HKU04x Making Sense of News is not only a treasure to anyone who is interested in Journalism; the fact that it is so successful also makes it a prized specimen for researchers, data analysts and online course developers alike.

On October 8, 2015, Dr. Masato Kajimoto was invited to discuss the findings on data analysis of his course and the next steps forward. The learning experience was designed to structure around short videos of lectures and key lesson summaries, supplemented by interactivity and forum discussions which were initially considered crucial by Dr. Kajimoto and his team. By the end of the course, details of student demographics, their behaviors (e.g., clicking and seeking) and performance were studied and surprisingly, the findings were contradictory to the team’s presumption. It was found that students who performed best in assignments did not have high engagement in forums, probably meaning that they did not require much peer assistance in understanding the contents.

The MOOC is currently being incorporated into an on-campus equivalent course, allowing undergraduate students to take the lectures online in alternative weeks. Dr. Kajimoto is planning to compare the performance of on-campus students and MOOC takers by giving identical quizzes. Although the findings will not come until the end of the semester, certain other benefits of flipped classes can already be seen. Dr. Kajimoto explained, “when the course [lecture] is online… they have to discuss the exercise [in tutorials]; they have to show the exercise to other students… I’m seeing better and deeper discussions among the students…”

The seminar ended with the promise to bring Dr. Kajimoto back at the end of the semester to share how the flipped classes worked.