KEEP Meets WASP Team At The Joint Seminar With HKBU

Knowledge and Education Exchange Platform (KEEP) and Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) held a joint seminar at the university’s main campus on October 20. At the event, KEEP met its potential partner, Web Annotation & Sharing Platform (WASP), a web-based learning environment.

Professor Irwin King, the Principal Investigator of KEEP, and his team made a presentation on the KEEP platform, while Professor Sandy Li, head of Department of Education Studies of HKBU, demonstrated WASP at the seminar.

Professor King encouraged course sharing on KEEP Moodle and KEEP Open edX, two recently launched free portals for teachers worldwide to share eLearning courses with students. Teachers can now apply for course space for free by simply submitting an online form on the KEEP website.

“If you are not a partner of edX, because it’s quite expensive to become a partner, but you want to have the experience of what edX is like, you are welcomed to come to our platform, create your course and play around with other features that are available,” he said.

Professor King also highlighted KEEPSearch, an educational search engine and one of the key components of the eLearning aggregator. “You will see that our search engine is different from the Google’s…this is just a focused search…it’s all from Hong Kong and all about education,” he said.

The second session of the seminar was a speech by Professor Li as well as his WASP project team. They walked the audience through the web-based platform where users are able to collaborate in groups to create annotation and share resources with each other.

The motivation for developing the social annotation tool is the penetration of social media in higher education, Professor Li said.

The WASP creators conducted studies on existing social annotation apps in the market and found that not enough products are available to facilitate users to reflect on and regulate their learning.

“Our motivation is, of course, to enhance the knowledge management facilities of those platforms. For most of those apps or tools available in the market, they could not support co-annotation for PDF files,” Professor Li pointed out.

Besides, participants of the seminar shared their eLearning experience and their insight into the way in which eLearning tool developers engage users to learn and teach with their products.