Editorial Message

Image source: Pexels

Welcome to the 17th issue of Teaching and Learning Connections! Our theme focuses on “Teaching Innovation and Development.” In this issue, we showcase seven projects by HKU colleagues from Architecture, Arts, Education, and the University Library, to demonstrate various ways to approach innovation and development in teaching and learning in higher education:

  1. Preparing to Work Together: Interprofessional Education via Online Simulated Case-Based Learning. Elizabeth Barrett, Patcy Yeung, and Anita Wong share their experiences of developing inter-professional education (IPE) for students who work in educational settings. This project is innovative as much of the prior work on IPE has focused on medical contexts. The project demonstrates the feasibility of the online mode of this IPE course to train pre-service professionals who will serve children with special educational needs (SEN).
  2. Watch This! The Cinema Intensive Care Units (CICUs) that foster students’ visual sensibility by Nikolas Ettel shows how we can design a communication intensive course assignment that allows students working in groups to receive feedback from peers and the teaching team on visual communication, and arrange individual small-scale consultation sessions for customised comment implementations in a Common Core Course. Students identified the value of feedback in the process and created a learning environment focused on creative idea development.
  3. Enhancing student-generated internal feedback by stimulating internal comparison and feedback-seeking behaviour by Kennedy Chan reflects critically on his new implementation of stimulating student-generated internal feedback in a training designed for pre-service teachers. The Peer Feedback Orientation Questionnaire (Kasch et al., 2022) was used to evaluate student learning experience. Results showed that the students report greater self-efficacy in providing peer feedback.
  4. New partnership between teachers and librarians in re-designing educational experience by Esther Woo explains how the University Library supports teachers in integrating emerging education technologies into their course design and delivery. The GLAM Lab at the library will evolve as an experimental ground for the incubation of both team and individual projects to advocate the creative use of digital collections and tools in the campus community.
  5. Chatbot as a Pedagogic Tool that Engages the Teacher and Students in Negotiating Course Expectations. Nicole Tavares introduces a pilot project which leverages on chatbots as tools for helping students set their personal goals and enhancing the course experience. The experiment successfully enabled her teaching team to facilitate refinement of the course LOs and communicate the “deemed-to-be-vital course objectives” to students for effective T&L. In the next implementation, Nicole plans to strengthen the chatbot design by adding a few open-ended questions to incorporate students’ voices.
  6. Creating digital platforms to explore computational approaches in the humanities (and beyond) by Christophe Coupe presents his experience to help students develop knowledge and skills about data science and computational modelling. He developed a digital platform to create effective situated learning opportunities to support students to analyse real, noisy and ‘imperfect’ data. For teachers who are interested in similar approaches but with less experience, Christophe suggests that they use the modelling platform Netlogo, which offers a more user-friendly experience.
  7. “Learning to learn from each other to appreciate diversity” – Co-fostering disability inclusion in teaching and learning in university education by Patcy Yeung and Dr Gloria Ma features a TDG project on advancing equality and diversity in teaching and learning. Based on the findings of multiple sources, including the focus group interviews, and the review of websites of 76 local and international higher education institutions, the team developed a guideline on fostering practices for disability inclusion in higher education. It covers broadly different stages of higher education from students’ perspectives, such as university admission, orientation, academic support, and career planning among others.
Dr. Ronnel King

Dr. Ronnel King

Editor of Teaching and Learning Connections
Associate Professor
Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning
The University of Hong Kong
Dr. Peter Lau

Dr. Peter Lau

Guest Editor of Teaching and Learning Connections
Lecturer
Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning
The University of Hong Kong

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