Bulletin No. 2, 2016

8 Chinese University Bulletin No. 2, 2016 Prof. Irwin King , Associate Dean (Education) of CUHK’s Faculty of Engineering and project investigator of KEEP, said, ‘The trend of providing quality education nowadays is to disseminate e-learning content to better engage learners. As an engineer, I wish to leverage technology for the betterment of teaching and learning.’ Teachers from Hong Kong institutions have created over 90 courses on the KEEP platform, while many more are in progress. Through collaborations with several global MOOC providers such as Coursera and cross-institutional projects like the BOLT (Blended & Online Learning & Teaching), KEEP has aggregated around 4,300 courses for global learners to access. Analytics for Personalized Education T he w i de s p r ead i n t r oduc t i on o f l ea r n i ng management systems (LMS) such as Blackboard Learn and Moodle has accumulated a vast amount of students’ learning and interaction data. On KEEP Moodle and KEEP edX, learners’ behaviours from video-watching, completion of quizzes and assignments to forum discussions can be tracked for purposes of understanding and optimizing teaching and learning. ‘KEEP provides a finer- grained learning analytics. Teachers can identify when students are more active in the forum responding to posts and answering questions. We use a formula to calculate how active students are. With their online behaviours plotted on a graph, teachers can easily observe student engagement at a glance,’ Professor King explained. The intelligent software can spot if a student is continually making similar mistakes, for example, which gives teachers capability to address the needs of individuals in a personalized way. On the other hand, learners can create their personalized learning path utilizing the course recommender based on their learning preferences and goals. ‘Learners taking MOOCs on the American War of Independence, for instance, can select the modules on economic consequences instead of the Five Major Services of KEEP KEEPSearch: an in-depth directory and search engine with dedicated educational resources from over three million education-related webpages being crawled and indexed; KEEPCourse: a gateway for students to enroll courses on international MOOC platforms such as Coursera, edX, ewant, xuetangX, etc., and for teachers to design online courses on learning management systems; KEEPCatalog: a showcase collection of the best-in-class software, hardware, and services for teaching and learning; KEEPoll: a real-time web and mobile polling service for interactive classroom communication; KEEPAttendance: a tool for teachers to easily take attendance with a QR code for students to scan. whole historical development.’ The content-based filtering system will recommend courses according to learners’ preferences, which saves them from having to select among a myriad of choices. Learning Community Reimagined Many people fear that e-learning will lead to less contact between students and teachers. In fact, e-learning can do the opposite by promoting self-regulated and peer-learning, which in turn enhances teacher-student interaction. Other benefits include easily digestible content and learning at students’ pace, which help learners create a sense of self-accomplishment. To this end, KEEP has partnered with Edore, a local startup promoting micro-learning. On the micro- module platform edore@KEEP where small chunks of media-rich learning content are developed, online supplementary exercises are automatically graded to give learners immediate feedback on their progress. The micro-learning platform empowers learners as they are allowed to create quizzes to challenge their peers, which implies a paradigm shift from one-way lecturing to learning community co-creation.