Humming: Hello from the Other Side

By Vienne Lin

Going back to the first issue, CoP – ITL envisions itself with a humming community. After more than a year of hard work, we are glad that this middleman has achieved some planned goals. We have brought together like-minded teachers across institutions, both locally and globally; created a trustworthy environment to discuss and reconsider shared concerns in our periodic professional development sessions; and supported members to experiment their innovative ideas and practices through the pilot project scheme.

What is unexpected (in a good way) is that the assessment rubric we developed for assessing the quality of small-scale pilot project proposals on internationalisation of teaching and learning was adopted by Prof. Betty Leask, our CoP – ITL’s international adviser, in her class entitled ‘Global Perspectives on Teaching and Learning’ in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, USA. Students of the Master of Arts in International Higher Education Programme took the assessment rubric as a model to develop their own rubrics for evaluating teaching in an international context.

The assessment rubric defines in writing what is expected of the pilot project proposals. It identifies five criteria: relevance, specificity, measurability, feasibility, and originality. Detailed descriptors for each criterion have been provided. It also provides a standard to determine what kind of projects can generate tangible and sustainable impact on teaching and learning as well as making original contribution to the field. If you wish to take a look at the rubric, please go to https://www.cetl.hku.hk/cop-itl/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Assessment-rubric-FINAL.pdf.

We are happy that the resource we developed within the CoP – ITL has been used as a teaching material for students at Boston College. We proudly consider this as our original contribution to the broad field of internationalisation of teaching and learning at an international level.