Supporting and Further Development of uReply

Principal Supervisors

Professor Paul Lam
(CLEAR)
Duration

2 years and 7 months
Approved Budget

HK $1,299,000
 
  • Abstract

Abstract

The Mobile Learning @ CUHK project funded by TDG in 2012-2015 has started a campus-wide service called uReply that greatly enhances classroom interactions through the use of mobile technology.  The system has attracted growing popularity among teachers at CUHK – usage doubled/tripled that of the previous one every year.  At present, over one-fourth of the teacher population has requested user accounts to use uReply.  In 2015, the system recorded accumulated page visits of over 1 million, meaning that roughly this number of interactions had taken place.

Classroom technologies in fact is highly related to the concepts of MOOC, SPOOC, MMCD and Flipped classroom – much attention has been paid to the preparation of multimedia learning materials while comparatively less effort is directed to change the dynamics in the classroom for more effective, interactive and innovative teaching and learning.

Through this project, we would like to acquire the essential resources needed to keep the service running, strengthen the hardware to cater for increased usage as well as to provide stronger buffer to prevent service interruption and data loss, and fund a few minor but highly meaningful extensions of the tools.  Specifically:

  1. To fund the daily operations of uReply.
  2. To strengthen the infrastructure to meet new challenges now posed by increased users, increased data traffic, higher volume of storage, and the growing demand of interrupt-free professional-grade services.  We propose new production servers, back-up servers, storage servers, testing servers, firewalls and routers and reach no single-point-failure configuration as soon as possible.
  3. Lastly, to respond to constant requests by teachers and students, we plan to build the following additional functions/services: a) course-level integration with the campus LMS and it also results in a new set of course-based learning analytic reports for participation and performances, and b) student-oriented functions for CUHK students to initiate interactions in the classroom, and c) a non-synchronous version of uReply which turns the question bank items into homework-type of self-learning resources.