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.
Organized by Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning
Chairperson: Prof Grahame Bilbow, Director, Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, HKU Speaker: Prof Dai Hounsell, Professor Emeritus, University of Edinburgh Date: 18 June 2015, Thursday Programme: 12:00 – 12:45 Sharing of HKU students’ voices on feedback (video and discussion)
13:15 – 14:00 Flipping Feedback
(Hot lunch will be served.) Venue: Multi-purpose Zone, 3/F Main Library
Abstract:
As one of the Join-the-Conversation events, and also part of the Wise Assessment Community of Practice project, this particular event focuses on one critical and indispensable aspect of assessment – enhancing the effectiveness of feedback to students on their progress and performance. The aim of this event is to promote discussion about the importance of feedback, its impact on student learning, and the ways of providing and enhancing feedback. Our speaker, Professor Dai Hounsell, will give a talk and invite discussions.
Led by Professor Hounsell, four Wise Assessment Briefings have been compiled on this topic, discussing a range of theories and practices in enhancing feedback, and will be available for participants during the event. In addition, we will also share students’ voices about feedback, which were collected from informal interviews with a sample of HKU students on campus.
About the speaker:
Professor Dai Hounsell is Professor Emeritus of Higher Education at the University of Edinburgh. He was the University’s Vice-Principal for Academic Enhancement from 2009 to 2012, Vice Principal for Assessment and Feedback from 2012 to 2014, and Professor of Higher Education from 2000 to 2014. He has published widely on assessment and feedback and many other aspects of university learning and teaching, served in various editorial and refereeing roles, and led several multi-institutional higher education research and development projects with external funding. He coordinates the work of the Wise Assessment Community of Practice Project, which is led by the Director of CETL, Professor Grahame Bilbow.
In the panel-led discussion, our panellists will outline assessment practices in their programmes or courses that involve experiential learning and invite questions and discussions. Copies of the relevant Wise Assessment Briefings will be provided for participants.
Coordinated by Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning
Date: 16 June 2015, Tuesday Time: 12:15 – 14:00 (Hot lunch will be served.) Venue: Multi-purpose Zone, 3/F Main Library
Co-chairs:
Professor Grahame Bilbow, Director of Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, HKU
Professor Dai Hounsell, Professor Emeritus, University of Edinburgh
Dr Albert Ko, Director, Gallant Ho Experiential Learning Centre, HKU
Panellists:
Mr Wilson Chow, Associate Professor, Head of the Department of Professional Legal Education
Dr Wilton Fok, Principal Lecturer, Assistant Dean, Faculty of Engineering
Prof Samson Tse, Associate Dean (Undergraduate Education), Director of Experiential Learning, Faculty of Social Sciences
Abstract:
This particular Join-the-Conversation event focuses on assessing experiential learning. We would like to take the opportunity to share with you some of our preliminary findings regarding effective approaches of assessing experiential learning at HKU and elsewhere from the literature. To date, we have conducted informal interviews with nine teachers and two students at HKU, consulted experts and scholars within and outside of HKU, and compiled three Wise Assessment Briefings about the topic, detailing a range of assessment practices in capstone projects and dissertations, courses and programmes, as well as the ethical dimensions in experiential learning.
In the panel-led discussion, our panellists will outline assessment practices in their programmes or courses that involve experiential learning and invite questions and discussions. Copies of the relevant Wise Assessment Briefings will be provided for participants.
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).
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.
Organized by e-learning Pedagogical Support Unit, CETL
Speaker: Professor Curtis Bonk (Professor of Instructional Systems Technology, Indiana University) Date : 5 June, 2015 (Friday) Time : 12:45pm – 2:00pm Venue : Room 321, Run Run Shaw Building (registration is capped at 60 due to room capacity)
During the past few years, learning has become increasingly collaborative, global, mobile, modifiable, open, online, blended, massive, visually-based, hands-on, ubiquitous, instantaneous, and personal. This is the age of Education 3.0 where learning is about playful and highly engaged design where learner creation of products is the new norm, often with the use of digital media. We humans tinker, invent, and express ourselves, and we find meaning in our playful pursuits. Fortunately, we are living in an age of educational resource abundance where passion, play, purpose, and freedom to learn take precedence over the more mind-numbing traditional information reception models of learning.
Instructors and experts are most effective as curators, counselors, consultants, concierges, and cultivators of student learning. These are the new instructional “C” words; gone are words like learning coercion, credit management, and fixed notions of correctness. Education 3.0 instructors are the ones who foster students’ autonomy and self-directed learning pursuits while, simultaneously, offering insightful guides and timely scaffolds where and when appropriate.
Attend this talk and find out how Education 3.0 will impact instructors and students, and how, in turn, we all can significantly impact it.
About the Speakers:
Dr. Curtis Bonk is Professor of Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University. A prolific author and internationally known speaker, he has published more than 300 articles and books on e-learning and has given more than 1,200 talks on many topics related to learning technologies and human learning.
Dr. Bonk received the CyberStar Award from the Indiana Information Technology Association, the Most Outstanding Achievement Award from the US Distance Learning Association, and the Most Innovative Teaching in a Distance Education Program Award from the State of Indiana. From 2012 to 2015, Bonk was named annually by Education Next and listed in Education Week among the top contributors to the public debate about education from more than 20,000 university-based academics. In 2014, he also was named the recipient of the Mildred B. and Charles A. Wedemeyer Award for Outstanding Practitioner in Distance Education.
Abstract This lecture will discuss how Berkeley has been performing relative to its MOOC goals: what has worked well, what they perhaps should have done differently or what they wish they were doing better, what challenges they face next, how MOOCs have affected classroom learning and teaching, and what their future might be at Berkeley. They continue to believe that the new momentum in online education is a strategic and permanent change for universities, even if that change ultimately takes a very different form than what the original MOOC creators envisioned.
Date: May 26, 2015 (Tuesday) Time: 6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. Venue: Lecture Theatre A, Chow Yei Ching Building, The University of Hong Kong,
Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong Speaker: Professor Armando Fox Charge: Free registration
About the Speaker
Armando Fox is a Professor in Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences Department and the Faculty Advisor to the UC Berkeley MOOCLab. With his colleague David Patterson, he co-designed and co-taught Berkeley’s first Massive Open Online Course on “Engineering Software as a Service”, offered through edX, through which over 10,000 students in over 120 countries have earned certificates of completion. He also serves on edX’s Technical Advisory Committee, helping to set the technical direction of their open MOOC platform. His current research in online education includes automatic grading of students’ computer programs for style and improving engagement and learning outcomes in MOOCs.
Those interested in attending are requested to register online before noon, May 22, 2015.
For inquiries, please contact us by email at enggfac@hkucc.hku.hk or by phone at 2859 2803.
Dr. Beth Simon Principal Teaching and Learning Specialist on the Course Success team, Coursera
Faculty member of UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering
Venue & Time: CPD 2.75, 20 May 2015 12:45pm – 2:00pm
Why create a MOOC in a science or engineering topic – and once you’ve decided to take the plunge, how do you set your course up to be successful on Coursera? Dr. Beth Simon will share her recommendations based on her experience both as a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and as Coursera’s Principal Teaching and Learning Specialist. In this workshop, we will discuss faculty experiences of creating courses in science and engineering subjects on Coursera, including faculty goals and motivations as well as practical advice and best practices for course design and implementation.
About the speaker
Dr. Beth Simon is the Principal Teaching and Learning Specialist on the Course Success team of Coursera. Beth is also a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego where she specialized in teaching large classes and improving learning with student-centered learning environments and educational technology. She also worked with faculty implementing hybrid/flipped classes using Peer Instruction as Director of UCSD’s Center for Teaching Development. In 2007-2008, Beth served as Science Teaching and Learning Fellow with Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman’s Science Education Initiative at the University of British Columbia.
Dr. Benson YEH, National Taiwan University
Venue & Time: CPD 3.04, 18 May 2015 12:30pm – 2:00pm
How can we keep students engaged in class? How can we make our students motivated to learn? These are the most challenging questions for teachers nowadays. Dr. Yeh developed a series of Peer-to-Peer teaching and learning schemes following his unique teaching teaching philosophy: “For the student! By the student! Of the student!”. In this talk, Dr. Yeh will explain how his schemes work and show the amazing results from his students’ course work.
Seminar: Gamification in E-learning
Professor Toru IIYOSHI, Kyoto University
Venue & Time: CPD 3.04, 19 May 2015 12:30pm – 2:00pm
Although gamification in education is not a new idea, the evolution of increasingly media rich, open, social, and intelligent learning tools, environments, and educational approaches—enabled and enhanced by information and communications technology (ICT)—is rapidly transforming the landscape of learning and teaching. This seminar delves into some of the critical pedagogical, cognitive, motivational, and emotional aspects of technology-supported gamification in education by reviewing and examining the past and present practice as well as foreseeing some of the future possibilities that will help further advance individual and collective capacity development and education systems in the 21st century society.
Public Seminar: Flipping the classroom – A new way to better learning
Dr. Benson YEH, National Taiwan University
Venue & Time: CPD 3.04, 19 May 2015 5:30pm – 7:00pm
Flipped classroom has attracted attention in recent years. However, how to conduct flipped classroom effectively remains a question to many teachers. How should a teacher motivate students to watch videos in advance? How can a teacher teach well without giving any homework? There are many doubts about flipped classroom for teachers without the experience.
Dr. Yeh is one of the most renowned teaching innovators in Taiwan. He developed a total solution “BTS Flipping” for flipped classroom. He has been invited to give more than 200 talks last year on “BTS Flipping”. Dr. Yeh’s talks have motivated tens of thousands of teachers in Taiwan to start flipping their classes.
About Dr. Benson YEH, National Taiwan University
Dr. Yeh has pioneered many educational experiments and designs:
He is the first to win the Overall Award and E-Learning Award in Wharton-QS 2014 Stars Awards: Reimagine Education, the “Oscars” of innovations in higher education.
He is the first to teach a MOOC course in Chinese with 48,000+ students.
He is the first in the world to design a MOOC-based multi-student social game to enhance the learning experience of MOOC students.
He is the first to design various experiential learning schemes that enable college students to be graded by elementary school students on their presentation skills.
He is the first to create and promote the style of designing mathematical problems with creative literary writing.
Since 2010, Dr. Yeh has been the strong advocator of his teaching philosophy: “For the students, By the students, Of the students”. It states that students can be motivated to learn if teachers can share more responsibility with them (e.g., by letting students design their own homework problems. Dr. Yeh’s speeches have motivated many teachers to start thinking differently in teaching. His new book on education, “Teach for the future” has been one of the bestsellers in Taiwan.
About Professor Toru IIYOSHI, Kyoto University
Toru Iiyoshi is Director and a professor at the Center for the Promotion of Excellence in Higher Education (CPEHE) of Kyoto University where he also serves as Deputy Vice President for Education. Previously, he was a senior scholar and Director of the Knowledge Media Laboratory at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies of the University of Tokyo, and Senior Strategist in the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Prof. Iiyoshi’s current areas of research and development include educational innovation and technology, open education, technology-enhanced scholarship of teaching and learning, and future of higher education systems. He works with various national and international initiatives, projects, and organizations in an advisory role to provide vision and leadership in the development and distribution of innovative educational technology. Prof. Iiyoshi is the co-editor of the Carnegie Foundation book, “Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge” (MIT Press, 2008).
Date: 12 May (Tue) Time: 11:30 – 12:45 Venue: Rm 321 & 322 Run Run Shaw Building Panellists: Dr. S.J. Aiston; Professor A. Djurisic; Professor Y.K. Kwok
Panel-led discussion session 2: Assessing presentations and groupwork
Date: 12 May (Tue) Time: 13:45 – 15:00 Venue: Rm 321 & 322 Run Run Shaw Building Panellists: Professor H. Corke; Ms. T.Y.C. Kee; Dr. S.Y.W. Shiu
Co-chairs:
Professor Grahame Bilbow, Director of Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, HKU
Professor Dai Hounsell, Professor Emeritus, University of Edinburgh
Professor Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, Director of Common Core Curriculum Office, HKU
Abstract:
As part of the ‘Wise Assessment Community of Practice’ project, CETL has been working with teachers across the University of Hong Kong to identify and surface particularly effective assessment practices that are currently being used within the University.
At this first ‘Join the Conversation’ event, we should like to take the opportunity to share with you some of our preliminary findings regarding effective approaches to assessment within the Common Core Curriculum, specifically in connection with the assessment of in-class participation, presentations and groupwork. To date, we have conducted informal interviews with seventeen Common Core course teachers and tutors, and compiled three Wise Assessment Briefings, detailing a range of assessment practices that take place in Common Core courses.
In the two panel-led discussion sessions, our panellists will outline assessment practices in their Common Core course(s) and invite questions and discussion. Copies of the Wise Assessment Briefings will be provided for participants.
About the panellists:
Dr. S.J. Aiston, Assistant Professor, Division of Policy, Administration and Social Sciences Education, Faculty of Education, Course Co-ordinator and Teacher of CCHU9043 “Thinking” Women: Their Oppression and Resistance
Professor H. Corke, School of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science, Course Co-ordinator and Teacher of CCGL9016 Feeding the World and CCGL9017 Food: Technology, Trade and Culture
Professor A. Djurisic, Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, Course Co-ordinator and Teacher of CCST9038 Science and Science Fiction
Ms. T.Y.C. Kee, Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture, Course Co-ordinator and Teacher of CCHU9037 Street Sense: The City and its Environments
Professor Y.K. Kwok, Associate Vice-President (Teaching and Learning), Associate Dean of Engineering, Course Co-ordinator and Teacher of CCST9003 Everyday Computing and the Internet and CCST9015 Electronic Technologies in Everyday Life
Dr. S.Y.W. Shiu, Associate Professor, Department of Physiology, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, Course Co-ordinator and Teacher of CCST9006 Biomedical Breakthroughs in a Pluralistic World
Interested participants are welcome to attend either or both of the sessions.
Hot lunch will be provided.
