KEEP - Building bridges in eLearning
4 Oct 2016, Tue
written by Bo Zhu (Project Manager of KEEP - Knowledge and Education Exchange Platform)
In today’s eLearning world, the best technology is often expensive or limited to only a select few and traditional platforms often restrict teachers from sharing content beyond the students in their own courses. The Knowledge and Education Exchange Platform (KEEP) provides all educators and learners with open access to the best educational resources, data analytics, courseware, and tools through a one-stop platform. KEEP is a partnership with all top 8 UGC institutions in Hong Kong, as well as with several leading global providers such as Coursera, Canvas, and XuetangX, among others. KEEP hopes to build bridges between teachers and technology, and across universities in Hong Kong to build a stronger educational ecosystem.
In today’s eLearning world, the best technology is often expensive or limited to only a select few and traditional platforms often restrict teachers from sharing content beyond the students in their own courses. The Knowledge and Education Exchange Platform (KEEP) provides all educators and learners with open access to the best educational resources, data analytics, courseware, and tools through a one-stop platform. KEEP is a partnership with all top 8 UGC institutions in Hong Kong, as well as with several leading global providers such as Coursera, Canvas, and XuetangX, among others. KEEP hopes to build bridges between teachers and technology, and across universities in Hong Kong to build a stronger educational ecosystem.
Building bridges between teachers and technology
Since its inception, KEEP has been committed to making it easier for teachers to use and access technology for teaching and learning. Before, teachers often commented how traditional attendance systems were too time-consuming or expensive, so KEEPAttendance was designed to utilizing students’ existing smartphones to automate the process. Teachers also expressed the need for a course-hosting platform that would enable them to better engage students. Professors Ron Kwok and Terence Cheung from CityU used KEEPCourse, confirming “the KEEP project brings a lot of fun and enables interactions of the three online courses at CityU piloted in 2015/16. The gamification approach enriches higher interactivity and student engagement in-class and out-of-class, and results in a blended learning environment.” Additionally, as teachers consistently voiced their desires to access learning analytics, we developed a central one-stop dashboard to view all learning activity from videos, pages, quizzes, assignments, and discussions from both KEEP Moodle and KEEP Open edX. Our hope is that these tools will narrow the gap between teachers and technology to improve teaching and learning.
Building bridges across universities in Hong Kong
KEEP is also focused on creating links and connections across educational institutions in Hong Kong. We’ve been encouraged by many teachers who have said KEEP is the only platform allowing them to teach students across and outside their university. Currently, on the KEEP platform, teachers in Hong Kong have created over 50 courses, almost 10 of them cross-institutional, under development by local teachers and staff, with many more in progress. One cross-institution course that has been shared is from the HKU Technology-enriched Learning Initiative (TeLi), a partner of the BOLT project. They produced a self-paced eLearning course, originally named Scaling Out Teaching; Scaling Up Learning, available to all institutions and utilized KEEP as a public platform to share this course. To facilitate easier access for students and teachers, KEEP is also working with the JUCC federation committee to develop single sign-on access for students across all 8 UGC institutions to the KEEP platform. We hope that as we work on these developments together, we will be able to see education in Hong Kong set an example for the world to follow.
The original article is published in the BOLT News Issue 3