The brains and builders behind the Knowledge and Education Exchange Platform (KEEP) visited HKU to demonstrate this one-stop e-learning aggregator on September 21, 2015.

Professor Irwin King, one of the Principal Investigators of KEEP, and also his team from CUHK, demonstrated on how learners can easily fish out relevant education content in a sea of learning materials around the globe. On the other hand, the platform is a hub where teachers are encouraged to share ideas on pedagogical innovation. In the near future, the KEEP team will be focusing their work around learning analytics, gamification, social learning and mobile learning. “We really believe that active learning and more engaged learning is the way for the future, and we want to encourage that,” said Professor King.

Professor Ricky Kwok, Associate Vice-President (Teaching and Learning) at HKU, also made use of the occasion to share HKU’s initiatives in gamification with examples of making the Rubik’s Cube a pedagogical tool in a course on everyday computing, and also designing a game for the MOOC on Epidemics (which is currently on offer). “It’s all about how to engage and incentivize participants to take desirable actions […] we want to make learning happen, that’s why we want to try the gamification idea,” said Professor Kwok.

The two parts of sharing triggered intensive discussions on the floor. The audience was curious to learn the tricks to engage course learners from the beginning to end and to further investigate in how gamification can be meaningfully incorporated in different disciplines.