UNLOCKING INNOVATIVE LEARNING:

Presentation title: Teaching Sustainability Across the Curriculum
(co-presented with Prof. David MOLE)
Innovative Pedagogical Approach: Sustainability Education

A number of important areas of study now opening up, including big data, entrepreneurship, design and sustainability, are transdisciplinary in nature. Teaching these areas requires innovation in our approach to the curriculum, both at the level new specialist courses, and in the development of existing courses that can make a contribution to students’ understanding of the area. To realize HKUST’s strategic goal of providing all undergraduates with an education in sustainability, we have taken the challenge of developing an education in sustainability across-the curriculum. This session will be an opportunity to share ideas and progress in achieving an effective sustainability education for our students.

Presentation title: Teaching for Innovation
Innovative Pedagogical Approach: MakerSpace; Flipped Laboratory; Integrated Design Model
Challenges Addressed: Learning Space; Broad Scope of Content; Assessing Engagement

Scientists investigate that which already is; Engineers create that which has never been.” The fundamental principle of engineering is to innovate, to find new ways of doing old things and new ways of doing new things. Hong Kong’s engineering education enjoys a very high standing worldwide but it is in all essential aspects a form of collegiate education, instituted and directed by educators, rather than by practitioners. Research has demonstrated that our students find it difficult to perform well in their final-year projects and feel very uncomfortable when dealing with ill-conditioned problems. The truth is, they master an analytical approach and deterministic process but not design and innovation.

A new framework composed of a consortium of innovative ideas for modern innovation mindset development is presented to enhance “innovativeness” of students. 3 major components of the proposed framework are shared and discussed:

• Student-centered MakerSpace initiative
• “Flipped Laboratory” modelling and prototyping modules
• Integrated cornerstone design course for first year students

All three components are unique initiatives in Hong Kong and their integration means that students can create things freely at any time. The cornerstone design course aims to provide first-year students with the insight to innovate and practice engineering design processes in a systematic manner.

This ongoing UGC-funded project, aimed fundamentally at redefining the traits of an innovation mind-set [3] in the modern context, identifies key development areas, technical skill sets and milestones to nurture innovative minds. The project will also develop a real student-centered MakerSpace to encourage students to build and create whenever they want to. This MakerSpace will also serve as a resource hub and training center for all the innovators within universities.

Presentation title: Engaging Students in Inquiry-based Activities in Lecture-based Class
Innovative Pedagogical Approach: Inquiry-based Learning
Challenges Addressed: Learning Space; Large Enrolment; Broad Scope of Content; Assessing Engagement

Often inquiry-based activities are mistakenly synonymized with group projects that involve a term paper and an oral presentation. However, there are many ways that students can be actively engaged in inquiry in the classroom. Indeed, some of these activities could be rather simple and can easily be modified from existing teaching materials. Here, I would share my experience in incorporating these “sense making activities” in two differently sized lecture-based classes and a professional training workshop, with the aim of helping participants to begin formulating an inquire-based activity that can be adopted in their classrooms. The activities I have employed include data interpretation exercises, interactive demonstrations, role plays, debates, and a virtual laboratory. Preliminary survey data suggest that these interventions are effective in boosting students’ interest in the subject and their confidence in solving problems independently. However, experience also indicate that instructors do need to put in extra effort to identify the learning objectives and design activities accordingly.

Presentation title: Motivating student innovation by impact creation
Innovative Pedagogical Approach: Experiential Learning; Design Thinking
Challenges Addressed: Learning Space; Scaling up; Assessing Engagement; Converting Theory into Practice

Student Innovation for Global Health Technology (SIGHT) is an undergraduate education platform for students to provide tangible solutions against health problems. Using global health issues as the backdrop, students are challenged to brainstorm, develop and implement appropriate technologies under low-resource settings. The teaching team of SIGHT combines approaches of design thinking, pedagogy in experiential learning, and empowerment for impact creation, to create a context that engages and enables undergraduate students to innovate. Since 2014, SIGHT has partnered with NGOs, local governments and tertiary institutions in Hong Kong, Guizhou, Cambodia and Indonesia. In this talk, the process of student-driven development of mobile electronic medical record system and its implementation in Cambodia will be highlighted as an example.

Presentation title: A study on applying the self-learning paradigm in teaching advanced technical courses
Innovative Pedagogical Approach: Experiential Learning
Challenges Addressed: Large Enrolment; Scaling up; Theory into Practice; Assessing Engagement

Computer science and information technology are two fast evolving fields in the modern world. An undergraduate program in these fields must consist of two key components: (1) a training in the fundamental knowledge of the discipline and (2) a training in self-learning. The latter component is especially important for graduates to adapt to the ever-changing world of technology. This project aims at studying the effect of applying the self-learning paradigm in teaching advanced technical courses in the computer science program. We identify the key differences between a self-learning lab-based method of teaching and the traditional classroom-based method. We study these differences through a controlled experiment in which we teach the same materials to two cohorts of students under the two different modes of study. We systematically collect and analyze student feedback, and compare and contrast student progress under the two teaching schemes.

Presentation title: Application of a Problem-Based-Learning Model in Designing Electronic Engineering Curriculum
Innovative Pedagogical Approach: Problem-based Learning
Challenges Addressed: Broad Scope of Content; Converting Theory into Practice

Electronic engineering has experienced a drastic growth due to confluence of various advancements in areas such as microelectronics, signal processing, communication technologies, and material sciences. As professionals in the field, students are expected to be able to grasp the relationships among various disciplines. However, students sometimes seem to lack the ability or motivation to go beyond factual knowledge to a deeper understanding of the course materials. They also have difficulties in connecting basic principles and concepts to their related essential applications. It is thus important to put more emphasis on developing students’ multi-dimensional and multi-disciplinary strength. The speaker will deliver how problem-based learning is applied to an EE course to nurture students’ learning motivation and attitude, ability in learning and potentials for creative problem solving.

Presentation title: Methods training for undergraduates: From the Kiss of Death to ‘Quite Interesting’
Innovative Pedagogical Approach: Blended Learning; Experiential Learning
Challenges Addressed: Large Enrolment; Assessing Engagement; Converting Theory into Practice

In this talk, I will reflect on my experience of applying a blended and experiential approach to teaching UG social science research methods to social science and humanities UGs at HKUST. This course matter is generally regarded as being undesirable for both faculty and students in universities around the world. The addition of an excellent set of online lectures by a previous course director here at UST gave me the foundations to refashion the course into a completely different structure and style. I will talk about what I did, went well, what I would do differently, what I learned and what (I think) the students learned.  

Presentation title: Experiential Sound Design
Innovative Pedagogical Approach: Experiential Learning
Challenges Addressed: Large Enrolment; Scaling up; Converting Theory into Practice

For this talk, we will share our journey in evolving an experiential sound design course from our initial ideas through its successive iterations, including the hurdles we came across how we managed to overcome them. It was really a controlled process of letting go, as we gradually realized the course would be better completely immersed in the aural tradition without lecture notes or exams. Our inspiration was to set up the course like a Harry Potter potions class at Hogwarts. Just as a potion might change the disposition of someone, music rather magically modulates the mood of listeners. We made each weekly lab assignment a wild Dungeons & Dragons musical adventure into the dark arts of mood modulation. Students had a chance to explore fully how plastic music really is, radically adapting it to different situations such as Nightmare Ringtones, Fantastic Beasts and How to Find them at UST, and White Snake Heartbreak. The lecture sessions turned into composition master classes. It was really fun to play the soundtracks generated by all the groups, since they were wildly different. They generated dozens of delightful surprises each week! It made a class of 60 students feel like a group of 6!

Presentation title: Entrepreneurial Education thru Experiential Learning in HKUST
Innovative Pedagogical Approach: Entrepreneurship Education; Blended Learning; Experiential Learning
Challenges Addressed: Large Environment; Broad Scope of Content; Assessing Engagement

“Can Entrepreneurship be taught?” This has been a question of debate in the academics for a long time.

The speaker has designed and taught HKUST Entrepreneurship courses in recent years. Most of the courses have very few lecture elements, and employed extensive experiential learning, including hands-on prototyping in software and hardware; bootstrapping real life solutions; engaging and studying real users’ needs, building MVPs (Minimum Viable Products); pitching to potential funders; dealing with real customers, data and money; engaging first-hand successful founders/entrepreneurs/innovators etc. Through non-traditional, non-lecture-based teaching methods, students are encouraged to acquire new skillsets and develop entrepreneurial mindsets. After most experiences, they are encouraged to use social media-based reflections, to reflect on their learnings. The reflections are needed to turn experience and sensations into knowledge, and mindsets.

To make students’ learning experience more authentic, students from different disciplines are formed into groups taking up roles in a company for the projects; thus appreciating strength and handling differences to work as a team.

Recently, these elements are further developed into the 3 credits Common Core Course (Entrepreneurship 1001) in which the major topics such as Design Thinking, Digital Marketing, Lean Startup, Makers' lab and crowdsourcing are developed as modularised bite-size courses for future uses. In this talk, the speaker will outline and discuss some of these innovative pedagogies and use cases for discussions.

Presentation title: Making Learning Fun and Meaningful in Small and Large Class
Innovative Pedagogical Approach: Flipped Classroom; Gamification
Challenges Addressed: Learning Space; Large Enrolment; Broad Scope of Content; Scaling up

In this presentation, Dr. Kenneth LEUNG will share his experience in using various types of active learning techniques in all his courses. In particular, he will share his experience in designing the online course materials and innovative in-class activities for a small flipped class, Exploring Multimedia and Internet Computing (COMP1001). He will also discuss the challenges that he encountered in flipped classroom - how to use online videos to engage students, how to come up with interesting in-class activities, how to perform assessment tasks.

Active learning does not only work for small classes. No matter the class is big or small, students can always benefit from peer learning. In this presentation, Kenneth will also share his experience in developing a social gaming platform for a large class, Discrete Mathematical Tools for Computer Science (COMP2711), to gamify online assessments by applying game-design elements and game principles to engage and motivate students.

Presentation title: Blended Learning for Music Education
Innovative Pedagogical Approach: Blended Learning
Challenges Addressed: Learning Space; Assessing Engagement

The presentation will be a sharing of my experience in implementing blended learning in a SPOC course. Using FutureLearn as the e-learning platform, I aimed to more effectively manage accumulating teaching resources and to foster more interactive and deeper learning experience. The 6-week module in my music education course incorporated traditional classroom sessions, as well as online asynchronous and synchronous learning. The module is also a product of collaborative efforts from colleagues in Canada, Japan and Israel. The course was designed for students of the Hong Kong Baptist University, but was also opened for registered users from University College of London, Korea National Open University, Tel Aviv University, Ionian University of Corfu, Okayama University of Japan, and SelfDesign Graduate Institute of Canada.

Presentation title: There and Back Again: A Massive MOOC Journey
Innovative Pedagogical Approach: MOOC; Peer Learning
Challenges Addressed: Learning Space; Large Enrolment; Scaling up; Converting Theory into Practice

The subject of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has gained considerable attention in higher education over the past few years. In particular, many educators are interested in how MOOCs might inform innovative pedagogy and course design for on campus courses. This seminar will take a look at MOOCs offered by the Center for Language Education, HKUST, focusing on our journey through design, implementation, and approaches to online teaching and assessment. This will be followed by examples of how CLE’s MOOC experience is having an impact on credit-bearing courses. Additionally, the seminar aims to initiate discussion on how these MOOC experiences might assist researchers, instructors and course designers with understanding student engagement in online learning.

Presentation title: Teaching Sustainability Across the Curriculum
(co-presented with Prof. Davis BOOKHART)
Innovative Pedagogical Approach: Sustainability Education

A number of important areas of study now opening up, including big data, entrepreneurship, design and sustainability, are transdisciplinary in nature. Teaching these areas requires innovation in our approach to the curriculum, both at the level new specialist courses, and in the development of existing courses that can make a contribution to students’ understanding of the area. To realize HKUST’s strategic goal of providing all undergraduates with an education in sustainability, we have taken the challenge of developing an education in sustainability across-the curriculum. This session will be an opportunity to share ideas and progress in achieving an effective sustainability education for our students.

Presentation title: Fire and Ice: Making Opposites Work through Blended Learning
Innovative Pedagogical Approach: Blended Learning
Challenges Addressed: Large Enrolment; Broad Scope of Content; Assessing Engagement; Converting Theory into Practice

Faced with time poverty, some students are not very keen on attending classes-- yet professors desire greater interaction between and with them. While some students hesitate to participate in class discussion, professors want to develop student confidence through active class participation and interaction.

A blended learning course was developed with a competitive marketing simulation as a major component. Students receive the foundational materials through video clips on a weekly interval. They then get a chance to interact with their groupmates through weekly decision making in the on-line based MARKSTRAT simulation that requires application of the on-line foundational materials. Debriefing takes place during the weekly classroom session.

The competitive nature of MARKSTRAT motivates students to take the online materials seriously, and they accomplish it efficiently due to the blended-learning nature of the course. Students are also more motivated to attend the face-to-face sessions in anticipation of exciting debriefing resulting from their online simulation activities. Most importantly, students’ confidence and leadership skills are enhanced through their active participation in the MARKSTRAT simulation.

The potential risks of free-ridership, poor face-to-face session attendance, and indifference towards the online materials are managed through the course assessment system consists of quizzes, assignments, reports, and peer assessment.

Presentation title: Cheerleading and Parenting: a Journey into Experiential Learning
Innovative Pedagogical Approach: Experiential Learning
Challenges Addressed: Broad Scope of Content; Assessing Engagement; Converting Theory into Practice

In Spring 2016, 2017 and 2018, a 2-level regular course on automation technology has been taught annually following the mode of Experiential Learning (EL). This talk presents the experience accumulated in the three successive offering of the EL course. In particular, successes and failures in mentoring the class and assessing the course intended learning outcomes (CILOs) will be discussed. Data collected before and after the EL courses indicated that students under EL mode of learning rated themselves significantly better in terms of agentic and cognitive engagement, problem-solving skills and confidence in pursing an engineering career as compared to their control peers taking similar courses with lectures and examinations (p<0.05). Three issues have been identified as critical to the success of this EL courses. They are management of students’ learning behaviour; workload and morale while allowing them remain in the drivers’ seats. Lessons learnt in tackling these issues will be shared.