HKU is a committed member of the UN campaign HeForShe. The overall goal of HeForShe is to spread awareness and spark actions on the responsibility that men and boys have in eliminating all forms of discrimination against women. TecHKU and TELI share the same vision. They mobilised a group of HKU students to organise a hands-on workshop “Girls4Tech” for secondary school girls in late February, and received enthusiastic support from our President Professor Peter Mathieson, “I’m particularly keen to see the University hosting this kind of event. This is exactly the kind of thing that the HeForShe campaign envisages. Starting at all ages – the idea of trying to improve gender equality. Technical careers are not just for boys, they’re for everybody.”
“Girls4Tech” aims to nurture computational thinking in secondary school girls and to inspire them on possibilities of developing a career in the tech sector. A detailed report on the event is available here.
Developing a learning game is not just about making the teaching materials an easier pill to swallow, but is also an attempt to create a resource so engaging that students will beg for more. In our Game Design Meetings, we figured that there are at least eight things to consider in gamification.
Balance between fun and education
Developing a learning game is different from preparing serious powerpoint presentations. While both aim at facilitating learning, the element of FUN is of particular importance in games.
Have a good understanding of both the educational topic and the game mechanism
To produce a game which is both fun and educational, it is of ultimate importance to figure out how to transform learning contents into gaming elements. Equally important is a good understanding of the type of game you intend to make, e.g., card game, collaborative multiplayer game, detective game, etc. The best way to familiarize yourself with a particular game mechanism is to try playing some related games.
Form a diverse team
It is important to have people with different expertise in your team to pool ideas and create a game for a diverse audience. Our Game Design Team comprises of instructional designers, multimedia experts, research associates, designers and programme developers.
While it is natural to include professional gamers in the development team, it is also crucial to invite laymen to join. Sometimes an uninformed opinion can be valuable in shaping the game.
Draw inspiration from existing games
Existing games are successful for a reason. Try them out and learn from them. For example, if you want to develop a strategic board game, recommended games include Kingdom Builder, Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, Tickets to Ride, etc….
Copyright
When drawing inspirations from other games, be aware of copyright issues. Consult your local copyright office if necessary.
Document all ideas discussed
Take note of all crazy ideas in your discussions, whether they are related to the main theme, scoring mechanism, functions of a particular card, anything. A seemingly useless or silly idea may eventually become an important element of the final product. Keeping a log book of ideas also makes it easier to create ‘trailers’ and draft official documents such as game specifications in the future.
Test out your prototype – again and again
Once you have developed a prototype, try playing it. Does it work? Is it playable? Does it facilitate learning? Invite your colleagues and friends to try it out.
Ensure every player has an equal chance to win
Test the game repeatedly to see if every player has a fair chance to win. Unfair games may demotivate learners.
Developing an original educational game is challenging but fun. Contact us if you are interested in developing a learning game for your students at HKU. Have fun!
On February 27, 2016, more than 120 bright young ladies from 17 local secondary schools gathered at HKU for the student-led event “Girls4Tech” to learn about careers in the tech industry and attempt hands-on coding exercises. Both our undergraduate organizers and the junior participants were greatly inspired by the experience.
At the one-day workshop, participants were engaged in a series of activities involving computing concepts such as coding, encryption, and sorting. In his opening speech, our President Professor Peter Mathieson encouraged young girls to challenge stereotypes and embrace new opportunities that our society has to offer in traditionally male-dominated sectors, including research, technology and computer science. “Technology is fundamentally about problem solving, and there’s no gender-specific environment to that,” he said. A number of distinguished women tech leaders also shared their career development journeys. Starting from March, participants will also be visiting tech giants such as Lenovo, Microsoft (Hong Kong), IBM, and Google to gain a deeper understanding of the tech industry.
“Girls4Tech 2016” was organized by TecHKU, short for The HKU Journal of Technology, formed by a group of students from the Faculties of Engineering and Social Sciences. This annual event aims to nurture computational thinking in secondary school girls and to inspire them on possibilities of developing a career in the tech sector. “We noticed that most companies in the region were trying to bridge the gender equity gap in technology by organizing similar events for university students, but we believed that such interests would be best triggered at a younger age,” said Vikay Narayen, student founder and consultant of TecHKU. According to a feedback survey conducted by TecHKU, 86.9% of the 85 respondents said they became more interested in tech after the event; 11% more reflected they are now interested to study ICT for the HKDSEs after joining the event.
(Source: TecHKU)
TELI was in full support of this event because we recognise the need to provide a broad range of knowledge exchange opportunities for our next generation, and we see the great potential of having our students empower their younger fellows. We deeply appreciate TecHKU’s initiative, which might have created life-long impact in the girls’ lives.
More photos of the event can be found on our Facebook and Instagram.
Stay tuned for more reports on the event.
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.
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)
Speakers: Dr. Lily Zeng, Assistant Professor, CETL
Professor Ricky Kwok, Associate Vice-President (Teaching and Learning)
Date : 8 March, 2016 (Tuesday)
Time : 12:45pm – 2:00pm
Venue : Room 321, Run Run Shaw Building (Main Campus), HKU
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.
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.
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!
Organizer: SPOC team, Technology-Enriched Learning Initiative (TELI) Date : January 26, 2016 (Tuesday) Time : 12:30pm – 2:00pm Venue :CPD 2.73, CPD 2.75 and CPD 2.77, 2/F, Chi Wah Learning Commons, Centennial Campus
About the interactive session:
Wondering what are the basics of an online course? Do you want to be innovative? But you don’t know where to start? If you have any of these questions, then maybe Small Private Online Course, commonly referred to as SPOC, might work for you. Come and join us in our series of TELI seminars on SPOC and learn its basic foundation and the different practices being applied in developing it.
In this interactive session, we will look closely into several SPOCs that are currently being developed in HKU. You will have hands-on experience with the different stages that spans from knowing the basic requirements to restructuring your course into an online mode, and from making a concise script to representing it visually through a storyboard. Plus, you can experience a mock-up studio filming and say a few lines in front of the camera. We will also explore different possibilities and options for collaboration to make your class more interactive, fun, and accessible through the use of different technologies and expertise available at TELI. This seminar is open to the first 30 registered participants to ensure that there is enough time to accommodate questions, provide comments, and give feedback for each participant. Late registrants will be placed in the waiting list and contacted when spots are available.
About the Team:
Our team, formed with the support of a UGC grant, is part of TELI that takes charge of the development of SPOCs within HKU. It is composed of four researchers and one programmer handling ten different courses across five different faculties for its initial stage. Wincy Chan is an instructional designer and researcher for SPOC with interest in students’ social-cognitive and behavioural outcomes across learning designs. Her current projects cover student learning in the traditional and blended classrooms. Elizabeth Oh is the project manager who oversees all project- and research-related activities for the SPOC team. As an avid online learner, Elizabeth is passionate about assisting teachers and students to use technology to advance learning in engaging ways. Donn Gonda is a tech-savvy research assistant currently responsible for the engineering courses. He is experienced in creating online contents for teaching and research. Andrea Qi is a project associate and research assistant responsible for the development, implementation and evaluation of a series of SPOCs. She is an experienced teacher in both F2F and online mode, and an active online course learner. Alex Yi is a technical officer responsible for the development of “Learning Design Studio” which is a handy tool to design teaching plan. He is proficient in various programming language and well adept in delivering courseware materials to the online platform.
This interactive session is open to the first 30 registered participants to ensure that there is enough time to accommodate questions, provide comments, and give feedback for each participant.
Speaker: Dr. Masato Kajimoto, Journalism and Media Studies Centre
Professor Ricky Kwok, Associate Vice-President (Teaching and Learning) Date : 14 January, 2016 (Thursday) Time : 12:45 pm -2:00pm Venue :Room 102, 1/F, K.K. Leung Building, HKU
About the seminar
Further to his seminar delivered on integrating a MOOC into on-campus teaching in October, Dr. Masato Kajimoto is offering to show us more data from the student evaluation of his online lecture experiment in the Fall semester of 2015-16. Some of his students are also joining the seminar to recount their experience of this flipped classroom arrangement. Professor Ricky Kwok will share with participants how he puts Masato’s initiative into context with the new paradigm of scaling out teaching and scaling up learning through the use of technology. We are planning to budget good enough time for you to raise questions, provide comments, and also to find out how the University might support your plans to introduce more innovative ideas in teaching and learning.
About the speakers
Dr. Masato Kajimoto is an Assistant Professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at The University of Hong Kong (HKU). Masato specializes in news literacy education, multimedia storytelling, and social media in journalism. He taught the third iteration of HKU’s online course on edX titled HKU04x Making Sense of News from May to June 2015. The course will be re-run from February 16, 2016 (register here).
Professor Ricky Kwok is Associate Vice-President (Teaching and Learning) at HKU, assisting the Vice-President and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Teaching and Learning) in various endeavors related to e-learning (e.g., MOOCs, blended learning and gamification). He leads the Technology-Enriched Learning Initiative (TELI) team which consists of e-learning technologists, instructional designers, researchers in learning analytics, specialists in systems development, multimedia talents and collaboration associates.
Event video
