Experience Sharing

Inquiry-based learning has received increasing attention and is shown to promote students’ learning in higher education. However, bringing inquiry-based activities such as case studies and hands-on demonstrations into the classrooms could be challenging for many. Some may find it hard to fit activities in already tight teaching schedule, others have limited time to develop new materials, and others may find it hard to encourage active participation. In this workshop, the presenter has shared my experience of designing and implementing interactive, guided inquiries for students in small (<20) and large (>100) classes for majors and non-majors both in Hong Kong and abroad and have demonstrated a few of those techniques. An open forum discussion was also be held to help participants explore how one may adapt these techniques in his/her own classrooms.

The workshop will showcase how Canvas functions were successfully implemented in two BL courses to enhance students’ learning experience.

Professor Groves will initiate a conversation about how to create a more interactive and participatory learning environment for undergraduates at HKUST. Critically reflecting on the uses of online technology in teaching, he will share some of his practices for engaging students, particularly with respect to what to do on the first day of class, developing assignments, and involving students in reading.

The Minerva project has attracted a lot of attention since its inception in 2014. Minerva presents a new system of higher education -- at once fully compliant with the existing model of higher education and at the same time a fully reinvented end to end experience. Across curricular design, pedagogical modalities, and operational decisions, Minerva's system presents a potential path forward for other institutions of higher education around the world. In this seminar, Ben Nelson has presented how this new system was designed and what other institutions can learn from it.

A best practice education infrastructure tool adopted by university Mathematics Departments, in very significant numbers since the 1990s, is a walk-in help center. Such a help center offers the large number of students taking background mathematics courses help in acquiring basic mathematical and problem solving skills. Concurrently, the rise of web educational platforms such as the open source online homework system WeBWorK is another infrastructure tool to improve the teaching of basic mathematics.

In this sharing, Prof. Chii Shang has walk through some importance and tricks he learned from his joyful journey of converting a traditional lecture-base course to a blended, peer, team-project-based, and even experiential learning course, without the hassle of making lecture videos. The sharing itself was not a lecture/seminar; instead the audience has experienced blended learning and interactions with the speaker.

As it name suggests, the basis of experiential education involves learning from experience. However, experience alone does not necessarily lead to true learning unless the experience is carefully chosen, authentic and well-structured. Given “experience” is the heart of experiential learning education, the course design, instructor’s facilitation, and assessment are all working towards one goal: to provide the conditions and create the experience for learning to happen. In this seminar, the speakers will use ENGG2900D (Community Services Project: Underwater Robot Community Engagement Project) as a showcase of how to use underwater robot as a driving vehicle to create meaningful learning experience for both UST students and the targeted serve group of school children with special education needs (SEN) or the ethnic minorities. This SENG, SSCI, and SBM co-listed course* was offered twice in Spring 15 and 16 respectively, the speakers will share the experience gained in the design, implementation, and assessment of this experiential learning course.

The seminar focuses on two themes; how successful collaboration with business practitioners has helped connect theories and applications, which acts as a source of inspiration to students. This builds on a major characteristic of MGMT 1120 Developing the Leader in You, which collaborates with leaders from the local industries to develop real-world course materials encompassing business scenarios and ethical issues. This partially involves the effective integration of experiential learning business cases to help motivate students on this course. The seminar also focuses on how a combination of knowledge-sharing and self-discovery processes further developed interest in this common core course.

We all have an enormous capacity to learn, but—despite being engaged in learning throughout our lives—decades of cognitive research have shown that our intuitions are oftentimes exactly wrong, leading us to choose suboptimal learning strategies over more effective and efficient ones. Despite the temptation to make learning feel easy, research has proven that durable and flexible learning results when it is more effortful. The strategies that enhance learning—through engaging learners in more effortful and elaborative processes—are referred to as “desirable difficulties”.

Augmented Reality (AR) overlays the digital world over the physical world – thus ‘augmenting’ the real world experience. With AR, people can overlay digital content to objects, printed material or geographic locations, then use a smart device to scan for the digital content to appear. AR creates unique interactive experience for learners and can “bridge the learning gap between abstract descriptions and the real world phenomena,” (Luckin, Fraser: 2011) offering the potential to motivate both learners and teachers to re-think the way they engage in learning and teaching.