TLIP Showcase Series

Practicing Job Interview Skills Anytime, Anywhere

One of the biggest challenges for students undertaking “LABU2060 - Effective Communication in Business Face” has been the lack of interview practice opportunities. With hundreds of students from the Business School taking the course, there lacked the resources to provide effective in-person interview practice sessions and feedback. To overcome this problem, Ms. Kasina Wong (Lecturer for the Center for Language Education) and her team have developed a job interview practice application with a built in Virtual-Reality option so that students can practice job interview skills and receive constructive feedback anytime and anywhere they want.

Kasina Wong Ka Sin | LANG

Watch Interview

This kind of VR learning is authentic, and it could provide feedback and practices for students, so I think I will continue to explore VR learning. I hope to contribute to this domain in the future.

Kasina Wong Ka Sin

About the Innovation

Challenges

As “LABU2060 - Effective Communication in Business” is a compulsory course with hundreds of students from the Business School, each cohort only had one lesson allocated for interview practice. Ms. Kasina Wong recognized the need for out-of-class resources to supplement the insufficient in-class practice time and materials. The physical limitations brought by COVID were also a catalyst for Ms. Wong and her team to think creatively and work to develop a job interview practice application with a built-in Virtual Reality function

Solutions

The application seeks to improve students’ job interview skills by providing two resources: 1) interview practice and 2) mini lessons. For the practice section, students interview with an avatar and are asked interview questions that have been tailored for 15 different professions with three levels of difficulty and three duration types. Upon completing the interview, students can self-rate their practice performance, receive standard feedback, and access their recordings on the project website. For the mini lessons, students can access pre-recorded short videos covering job-seeking topics.

Results

The project has been implemented in LABU2060 and LABU2060G - ‘Effective Communication in Business’ since Fall 2019. Lessons in ‘Job-seeking Phase 1’ of the course were modified to include the VR (Virtual Reality) interview application and to introduce a blended element on the course as is encouraged by HKUST. Students were encouraged to practice with the app and watch the mini-lessons there and on the project website to save class time for in-person practice and more qualitative teacher feedback. Additionally, the job interview assessment was gamified to boost students’ motivation to use the app. A leaderboard and badges were designed that can be automatically awarded after use. Please go to the Project Walkthrough for more details.