This project is about providing an interactive learning platform for the sometimes difficult conceptual material covered in the compulsory first-year course ENGE1640 “Introduction to World Literatures in English.” The nature of the subject matter means that students are asked to explore literature from around the world. This can be particularly disorientating to those with limited exposure to the world beyond Hong Kong. What I propose here is to develop an interactive and animated map of the world that can be explored to understand the various flights and dimensions of English language and literature (as it travelled with the British Empire; along the contemporary circuits of globalization; and, ultimately flowered into new languages and literatures upon contact with the numerous local languages it encountered). Of course, each territory of encounter abrogated and appropriated English language and literature in its own way. It is about revealing such unique “treatments,” and the way they produced different miens to English, that this interactive animated map seeks to expose. To this end, this project can rightly be considered as a means of developing an important (and a highly overdue) learning material. While the project is primarily aimed at engaging students’ interest in the wider subject matter through the implementation of such technology, there is certainly room to develop this into a platform that also integrates formative and summative assessment. I think one of the great benefits of this project is that it allows for the development of modules that can be easily “bolted onto” the already existing material. That is to say, there is scope for this project to be constantly developed (in a cumulative fashion), leading to an impressive, perhaps one-day nigh-on exhaustive, learning resource.

PopQuiz is an online video-based lecturing platform. The theme of PopQuiz is to allow students to interact with the system according to the knowledge they learned from the video. The primary application of this system is for programming training.

A teacher can set up a series of questions that will pop up during video playback. At each popup question, the playback will be stopped. Correspondingly, the question contains instructions that ask students to write programs, submit their work, and get immediate feedback. Students have to provide a correct answer in order to continue with the video playback.

In addition to programming-based questions, PopQuiz also supports other forms of questions including multiple choices, text input, etc. Currently, PopQuiz is adopted by the course CENG 3150 - Principles of System Software - offered by Department of Computer Science and Engineering. In conclusion, PopQuiz is a platform that enables students learning interactively outside classroom.

EasyScriptor is an online web-based wizard-like system for composition of a term paper, for use by students new to academic writing and the associated expectations. The motivation stems from a College General Education course, in which students in their very first term in university were required to write a term paper. It was fully expected that most students would not yet write with originality, cogency, force and elegance; but surprisingly many had difficulties even with low-level skills that academics too often take for granted, for example, improper and inconsistent formatting, poorly organized paragraphs, and wrong citations. In light of this, EasyScriptor is designed and implemented so as to assist and teach students in writing term paper. The paper is produced to a professional-looking format, allowing output in different modes such as outline, full draft, and finished paper. Furthermore, the writer is guided towards systematic organization in phases: first write an outline, down to a topic sentence for each paragraph, such that the outline can be submitted to teachers for guidance. The system is released in 2013-2014 Term-1, and is being used by a College General Education course of about 70 students.

The introduction and implementation of a four-year curriculum has posed great challenges, not only for the University, but also for teachers of different faculties. The Health Sciences I Course (four-year curriculum), which forms part of the Faculty Package, was introduced to first year students in September 2012. The course aimed to teach students some basic physical and chemical science in the areas of chemistry, physics, organic chemistry and cell biology, with some orientation to human physiology, enabling them to understand and explain the natural physiological processes that occur in the human body when they proceeded to the second year.

Students from Medicine, Pharmacy, Nursing, Chinese Medicine and Public Health were required to study the course in the first term. However, a number of study and learning issues were identified by these students. There was a lack of suitable textbooks covering the particular topics taught. Students requested the provision of a platform for self-administered quizzes or exercises.

In view of the varied difficulties, the project members maximised the use of technological advances by developing the HSApp in October 2013. This application has two variations in terms of difficulty of content, HS(a)App and HS(b)App, which are targeted to each group of students. The applications were optimised for iOS devices and were distributed to students via the Blackboard Learn Platform in mid-November 2013.

Background

It is the usual practice for teaching team to link the culturally–specific scenarios to the clinical teaching topics of obstetric nursing. The lecturers usually supplement her theoretical teaching content with story-telling, sharing on personal clinical experience and local newspaper cuttings. To promote e-learning as an attractive medium for teaching, the teaching team aimed to develop an interactive courseware, with the use of local scenarios on real cases, to guide and enrich students’ knowledge of obstetric nursing and interest in self-study

Procedure

The project was conducted in two phases : Phase I was to collect the real-life scenarios, photos and videos from the target obstetric unit of a hospital. With the permission from the target hospital review board, the project team completed the video-taking works in three consecutive weeks (July 16-August 2, 2013). Although some pre-set topics for video /photo-taking could not be accessed in the clinical site during the working period, we have completed most of the shootings as originally planned. The 2nd phase was to design a e-learning platform on the course Blackboard. With the help of student helpers and technical staff of the School, 6 selective video vignettes have been uploaded onto the Blackboard for students’ self-study in the two obstetric courses. Student who had watched the video vignettes were invited to complete a short satisfaction survey to reveal their comments.

Result

With the permission from the target hospital review board, The project team completed the video-taking works in three consecutive weeks (July 16-August 2, 2013). Although some pre-set topics for video /photo-taking could not be accessed in the clinical site during the working period, we have completed most of the shootings as originally planned.

According to the Blackboard record statistics, there were 60 master students and 92 bachelor students had made access to the videos-vignettes. However, totally only 92 completed questionnaires with 48 from the master and 34 bachelor programs were collected.

IBM SPSS version 21 was used to compute the descriptive statistics of the findings. Overall, the students’ satisfaction towards the obstetric e-learning materials was very high. Most of the respondents rate 4 on 9 out of 10 items (mode=4). Narrative comments were also very positive and encouraging. Though some technical problems were identified, such as loud background noise blocking some subjects’ conversation, most students reflected that the real-life clinical case scenarios as shown on the videos were very helpful in their learning of obstetric care. The vivid clinical case scenarios could motivate their interest in self-study and thus help them prepare better both physically and psychologically for coming practice in real clinical settings. More topics of clinical case vignettes were suggested to produce by the students.

Medication and patient safety have been an area of focus in healthcare research and have been reported to occur with alarming frequency with the great majority involving junior healthcare professionals. A recent national survey of United States and Canadian Medial Schools suggested that only a few schools have explicit patient safety curricula, and most existing curricula are based in lectures or small group discussion. The current project aimed (1) to develop applications on handheld mobile devices for the topics related to medication safety; (2) to incorporate clinical teaching environments on mobile handheld devices; (3) to assess the acceptance of this new courseware in Medication Safety for teachers and students; (4) to pave way to expand the usage of this new courseware in other disciplines within the Faculty of Medicine. This was the first cross-disciplinary collaboration within the Faculty of Medicine to develop teaching tools to enhance knowledge and skills in medication safety.

Chinese Materia Medica (CMM) is a core course for the Bachelor Programme of Chinese Medicine that requires the students to memorize the properties of over 100 commonly-used herbs and medicinal agents. Memorization of these data is essential for them to further courses such as Formulae of Chinese Medicine and discussion of classical or alternative usage of herbs. While rote memorization is still the main method of learning, students in the past used to create piles of paper flash cards by themselves for revision purpose. However, the production of hand-made paper cards is often inconvenient and not so effective.

With the increase in popularity in Smartphone, we are now creating “CMM Memorizer”, a mobile learning platform which includes flash cards and other functions including e-book and quiz games. Students are more readily and encouraged to view the flash card repeatedly at anytime and self-report the learning progress. The e-book which contains brief information and photo of the herbs serves as a quick reference. The quiz game targets at the matching of the names and the particular natural properties of the herbs. All of these provide an interactive learning experience at the palm.

CMM Memorizer is officially released on March 28, 2014 at the campus app store hosted by ITSC, CUHK. Current students of CUHK could get access to the apps at https://campusapps.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/store The current project is funded by the ITSC Courseware Development Grant (2012-13). Acknowledgement to the ITSC Courseware Development team for their support and help in completing this project.

Public health is both an art and science of health promotion and protection. Most undergraduate courses introduce students to a large array of theories and terminologies that are critical building blocks for advanced study within the discipline. However, most assignments and assessment methods focus on group projects, case studies, and essay writing, compromising the appeal of investing time in acquiring a concise and accurate understanding of key concepts, forgoing a solid foundation that serves as the cornerstone for deeper analytical understanding. To meet this learning-gap, the Global Health 1001 mobile application aims to identify and categorize key terminologies useful for deepening students’ study of climate change, disaster, and humanitarian crisis-related public health problems and engage students in learning these useful terminologies any time anywhere by flipping through flashcards and having their level of understanding rated to track progress. Over 800 terms and phrases are organized by topics and delivered through bite-size lessons, so that students can take small steps to accomplish greater goals.

PHPC3016 is developing experiment materials for our students to obtain a whole picture of the environmental monitoring in air/waste water sampling and chemical analysis. Due to the time limitation of the course, we could only deliver experimental work in laboratory which is mainly focus on the analytical part of the samples. Many preparation works, sampling procedure even part of post-sampling treatment are not seen in real by students. In addition, some experiments are time consuming which will increase the chance of getting errors in the experiment. Consequently, students could not obtained favorable results after spending a week of efforts. Therefore, provision of multimedia course materials is suggested to fill the gap between the lab-works and pre/post-lab works to reduce the chance of errors raised. Students will take a series of quizzes/assessment to ensure they could obtain sufficient knowledge through web-learning. The project aims at providing a platform to undergraduate students to understand the technique of environmental monitoring and analysis.

Teaching medically-related topics to students with diverse backgrounds can be extremely challenging. Students from non-science disciplines always encounter difficulties in understanding medical terms, physiological concepts, or biochemical pathways. With the advancement of wireless communication technologies, electronic devices such as laptop computers, tablets and smart phones become part of the students’ daily lives. Knowing the use of web-based platforms to disseminate information exerts positive influences in motivating students’ learning, the current project aims at developing a courseware to facilitate the learning process of students of heterogeneous backgrounds. Animations are designed for carefully selected topics for elaborating complicated concepts in an easy to understand manner. The courseware also includes a glossary list of medical terms for off-lecture review. Both the animations and glossary are downloadable to the mobile devices, so that students can access the courseware easily at anytime and anyplace. Auto-marking quizzes are integrated into the CU eLearning System as a self-testing tool, and students are invited to prepare the quizzes together to cultivate a peer learning environment. Through question design and by posting their questions to the CU eLearning System, students are able to learn from each other through explaining the ideas to their peer classmates.