ACU: Addressing global challenges through Commonwealth Virtual Exchange

Students exercise leadership, teamwork and problem-solving skills for an innovative business solution to address a global challenge.

Travel restrictions of the pandemic have given new significance to the concept of virtual mobility. The Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) in collaboration with 10 of its member institutions, including CUHK, launched the Commonwealth Virtual Exchange (CVE) pilot.

Commenced in October, the 8-week programme offered 50 students an opportunity to work collaboratively on a project that was designed to enhance entrepreneurship and intercultural competencies of the participants. Mentored by a facilitator, each student team studied and analysed a global challenge linked to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and created a business model canvas to solve an aspect of that challenge.

A mini hybrid conference was held as the programme finale at the end of November and one of the highlights was the 5-minute Virtual Pitch Competition. Two student teams achieved excellent result. Our CUHK student Sally Cheung’s team was the first runner up and Ricky Tian’s team won the People’s Choice award. ‘Through this project, we overcame the difficulty of working in different time zones and were able to explore the future through intense communication,’ Ricky said. Sally enjoyed working with students from diverse cultural backgrounds on creative projects and she learnt more about the SDGs from this programme. To read sharing from other participants, please click here.

The Office of Academic links offers a variety of Global Online Academic Learning (GOAL) Programmes for students. Please check out our website to learn more.