Abstracts of Funding Scheme to Enhance Student Engagement and

Address Student Learning Needs

(Supported by Teaching Development and Language Enhancement Grant 2022-25)

No.	Project Title	Abstract
1.	Ethical Use of Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education - How Can We Support Teachers and Students at CUHK?	The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education (HE) has risen during the recent years. The development of AI in HE revolutionizes the way we teach and learn. However, this powerful tool also has created unprecedented impact with academic, ethical and legal challenges. Moreover, the understanding and needs of using AI ethically for teachers and students will be different. Recently, the university has published the guidelines on the use of AI tools in teaching, learning and assessments for both teachers and students. In the guidelines, many important aspects related to sensible and ethical use of AI tools have been mentioned. In the current proposal, we aim to contribute in 3 areas (i) increase awareness of ethical and appropriate use of AI tools at CUHK; (ii) evaluate the current utilization and understanding of using AI tools in education of both students (including students with special education needs) and teachers; and (iii) provide support to teachers for student engagement using AI tools in classroom ethically. For the above 3 areas, we shall (i) prepare micromodules and videos to increase awareness of appropriate and ethical use of AI tools at CUHK; (ii) conduct surveys and focused group interviews with students and teachers to evaluate their understanding and utilization of using AI tools in education; and (iii) conduct training workshops and seminars for teachers and teaching assistants for the support of ethical use of AI tools in classroom.
2.	The Peer Advantage: Harnessing the Power of Peer Learning for First-Year Growth and University Transitions	· This proposed project aims to support students in their transition to university life by creating a structured and supportive peer learning program that enhances academic and social integration. · The Peer Assisted Study Sessions (PASS) model has long been used to promote academic success and social integration. The five units of the project members have already paired peer learning with their selected first-year or gatekeeping courses using the PASS model. · This project will reinforce and deepen the success of the PASS model at CUHK by equipping student leaders with a more purposeful role as Transition Ambassadors, expanding the program to the Department of Chinese Language and Literature for University Chinese courses, building an inter-departmental good-practice depository of facilitation strategies, organizing sharing sessions across units involving both teachers and student leaders, and furthering the development of systematic evaluation and scholarly pedagogical research of PASS. · These reinforcements will create a sustainable impact by building a community of PASS across different units, providing comprehensive support to first-year students, helping them overcome the challenges of transitions during their critical time and setting them up for success throughout their university life. The project members have received the University Education Award 2021 for their work, and this project aims to build upon that success.
3.	Micro-modules for Chung Chi College Credit-Bearing Service-Learning Programme	The proposed project aims to enhance students’ understanding of the idea of Service-Learning (SL) and the missions of the Credit-Bearing Service Learning Programme (CSLP) of Chung Chi College through viewing short videos. The short videos will be developed to instruct students how to design service plans and showcase the past student service-learning activities for fulfilling the particular course requirement of the CSLP, which covers the two courses, namely GECC1132 “Learning through Serving: Student-Oriented Teaching” and GECC3230 “Service-Learning Programme” (Local / Non-local / Student-initiated projects). The videos will introduce the key concepts of SL, the development of the SL in Chung Chi College, course components, guidelines on assignments, and clips of past students’ SL activities. The videos, as incorporated into micro-modules, will be uploaded to Blackboard, a full-featured learning management system of CUHK. Students can watch the videos online free from time and geographical constraints. Students can have a better understanding of the course content before enrolling in and/or attending the classes, so there will be more time for interactions among teachers and students at class to elicit more in-depth reflection on university learning. The videos will also focus on how to identify community needs and to implement service addressing the service targets’ needs, as well as the integration of cross-disciplinary knowledge and personal skills. Students will be recruited to the project and they will be equipped with the video design and production skills. The micro-modules are intended to be used in 2023/24 and onwards.
4.	Micro-modules for Chung Chi College General Education	This project aims to develop micro-modules in the form of videos to facilitate eLearning and flipped classrooms in the College General Education (CGE) courses of Chung Chi College. The primary objective is to enhance students' understanding of the CGE courses and enrich their learning experience. Short videos will be created to provide details of the following CGE courses, namely GECC1130 Idea of a University, GECC3130 Exploration and Discovery, and GECC4130 Senior Seminar. The videos focus on helping students to develop an understanding and appreciation of university education, the origins, traditions and objectives of universities, and their relationships with the contemporary society. Students can have a better understanding of the course content before enrolling in and/or attending the classes, so there will be more time for interactions among teachers and students at class to elicit more in-depth reflection on university learning. The videos, incorporated into micro-modules, will be uploaded to Blackboard, a full-featured learning management system of CUHK. Students can watch the videos online, free from time and geographical constraints. For the research-based courses GECC3130 and GECC4130, the meeting times between course supervisors and students are limited during the research period, this approach promotes a more effective and engaging learning experience for all involved. The videos will feature how to conduct a small group research on topics of interdisciplinary nature, current affairs, cross-disciplinary knowledge or daily life issues. The videos will also feature some exemplary projects for students to draw inspiration from and to help them understand how to apply the concepts in practical settings. They can always recap the videos whenever they want and have better preparation for any assignments and group projects before attending the lessons. Micro-modules for the course GECC1130 will include a short quiz, serving as an evaluation tool. The response rate and scores will reflect students' engagement and general understanding of the subject. The statistics tracking function of Blackboard can be used to monitor the viewing records of students. These data can reflect the course's effectiveness in terms of virtual learning experience. The micro-modules are intended for use in the academic year 2023/24 and onwards.
5.	AI Interview System for eLearning	· KEEP plans to develop an AI interview system for education that benefits students and teachers. The innovative technology aims to enhance the learning experience by providing a simulated interview environment, enabling students to develop essential interview skills and assisting teachers in assessing student learning progress and career readiness. Initially, the system will be launched on the KEEP platform and will be available to invited CUHK students. · During the interview, the AI algorithms select questions to display on the screen and simultaneously record the candidate responses. The system assesses candidates’ readiness by evaluating their responses, body language, and overall interview performance. · Educators and teachers will have a crucial role in the process, extending beyond reviewing AI interview system reports. They will actively participate by setting interview questions, inviting students to partake, monitoring progress, providing direct feedback, and contributing to system fine-tuning. We will actively encourage teachers from diverse disciplines, such as business, computer science, engineering, English language teaching, and more, to incorporate our system into their classroom settings. Through this collaborative effort, we aim to create a dynamic and impactful educational tool. · The benefits of the AI interview systems are threefold, including: o Providing consistent, objective evaluation of interview performance The AI interview system evaluates candidates’ performance according to a standard baseline criteria regarding speech patterns and other nonverbal cues. This approach improves consistency and helps reduce unconscious human biases and subjectivity during the interview process. As we develop the system, we will establish a set of design principles to ensure the AI is ethical, fair, and beneficial to everyone. o Customizing support for students of different needs The system provides a library of interview questions that can be tailored to different education levels, disciplines, and career paths. It can also be tailored to accommodate students’ specific job preferences, such as aspiring teachers, nurses, engineers, or any other desired professions. This flexibility will ensure relevance and alignment with specific learning objectives. Additionally, the AI algorithms can generate instant feedback and evaluation reports, highlighting areas of strength and improvement for each candidate. o Systematically analyzing candidate responses The system assists teachers in evaluating candidate performance, identifying strengths, weaknesses, and areas for growth. It also provides teachers with a comprehensive dashboard, showcasing individual and aggregate student performance data. Teachers can access detailed reports, track progress over time, and gain insights to guide their instructional strategies.
6.	Innovative Digital Learning Space Drives Stimulus Motives in Quality of Education	After the 3-year COVID-19 outbreak, the learning format is gradually transitioning from remote video conferencing to traditional classroom settings. Despite this, the experience of utilising different remote in recent years has reminded us of the limitations of the traditional teaching format, especially in the support of students with SEN, and the insight into how a digital learning environment can facilitate learning. In alignment with the University's strategic plan 2021-25 in the quality education of sustainable development to achieve universal access to quality higher education, our team explores the institutional readiness to adopt a virtual learning environment (VLE) in teaching and learning activities. In this proposal, we aim to a. Develop a novel Digital Learning Space providing an alternative, attractive and appealing informal virtual environment with high-quality interior designs which offer students alternative learning experiences, including multimedia content and interactive, hands-on practice so as to enhance engagement, personalisation and inclusivity while addressing the needs of students and student with special educational needs (SEN). b. Hold workshops for the co- and re-design of ideal VLE involving student participation to investigate their individual needs and possible solutions for the improvement of education quality in sustainable development, especially for students with SEN. We aim to explore if the novel concept of VLE and co-design of learning spaces with an effective teacher-student feedback loop can provide a breakthrough for catering for the individual needs of students while improving their intrinsic motivation to learn and knowledge competency. Furthermore, student-led activities can enhance not only their insights into academic knowledge but also their communication, collaboration and problem-solving skills, which are invaluable to students, especially those with SEN. With the students’ feedback, we as educators can, in turn, design engaging, personalised and inclusive learning spaces, which play an influential role in achieving sustainable development goals, especially for the health and well-being of students and high-quality education.
7.	A Medical Student-led Initiative to Enhance and Promote Psychological Resilience and Wellbeing Using Social Media	· Medical students are reported to experience high levels of stress and burnout during their undergraduate medical training. · Stress and burnout can have serious consequences to students’ psychological and physical health. · These point towards the importance of promoting psychological resilience and wellbeing during medical training years. · Mobile devices and social media provide great educational e-learning opportunities to students. Its adoption and application provide plentiful learning opportunities to students for collaborative learning and sharing of resource materials. It allows students to create, edit and share content in graphical, video or audio forms. · This project aims at engaging students to lead the initiative to promoting psychological resilience and wellbeing via social media. · Created by medical students for medical students initially; our social media accounts are open to public, hence will also benefit a wide audience. · Recruiting medical students to lead this project, working together as a team to prepare content, has double advantage of students themselves learning information that prepares them for the demanding future ahead as doctors. In addition, first year students can benefit from either learning from contents as a user or being part of the project team; helping them to overcome challenges in transition from secondary to university education. · All contents will be evidence-based and vetted by the principal supervisor (specialist-in- psychiatry) · Will produce a yearly digital online Resilience/ Wellness magazine containing produced contents distributed to all medical students.
8.	Modular Educational Escape Rooms: a Programme-level, Scalable Pedagogy for Enhancing Learning, Teamwork and Communication Skills	Escape room games are a popular leisure activity in which participants form a team and solve a series of puzzles together to escape from a locked room. They can be used in academic settings to undertake a formative assessment or assessment-for-learning which involves teamwork, communication skills and active learning of higher education course material. In the post-pandemic era, university education must re-incorporate physical learning spaces and pedagogies which promote problem-solving in small teams with no access to external devices such as the internet or generative AI’s. We will design a modular learning space for use at the programme level, which will initially be employed by teachers from Medicine, Nursing and Pharmacy. With a modern and engaging theme co-designed with students, teachers from across our faculty will be able to build engaging academic content to place in the escape room for students to solve. Paired with debriefing exercises, this teaching innovation is highly scalable and cost-effective, serving a range of courses whilst minimising burden on teachers. In particular, by centralising the gamification and pedagogical design to our team, teachers across our many programmes can focus on designing the academic content for their students to experience in this novel form of learning.
9.	Courseware Support for Local Students Taking CLCP3702 (Learning Putonghua through Movies)	In Fall 2022, Yale-China Chinese Language Academy launched a new 2-unit course for local students titled “Learning Putonghua through Movies” (CLCP3702) in tandem with the change in language requirements for undergraduate students. The course was offered in Fall 2022 and Spring 2023, with local students expressing high interest in the course due to its dynamic nature. Much positive feedback was received as a result. In this project, we aim to create supporting courseware to enhance students’ learning experiences, as there is currently a gap in out-of-class practice activities and study materials. Furthermore, as this is a Putonghua course for local students, we aim to supplement Pinyin for subtitles in the selected movies to strengthen students’ cognitive mapping of Chinese characters to Putonghua. E-Learning exercises will be developed to enhance students’ overall knowledge of Putonghua, including the Pinyin system, standard and regional pronunciation, differences between Putonghua and Cantonese vocabulary and grammar, as well as usage. The supporting courseware developed in this project will benefit students greatly, as students will have a reinforced background in Putonghua and an arsenal of tools at their disposal when they need to communicate with users of Putonghua from all over the world.
10.	Localizing the Context for International Students Studying Putonghua in Hong Kong （CLCP3323 & 3353）	In Fall 2022, the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages and the Yale-China Chinese Language Academy jointly launched two new minor programs, one of which is the Chinese (Putonghua) as a Second Language minor program. Accordingly, the University Putonghua Programme at Yale-China Chinese Language Academy is undergoing a curriculum review to streamline the curriculum and new textbooks are planned to be released in phases. This project will add an essential component to the curriculum review: localizing the context of the new textbooks, especially in terms of content. Traditionally, for Putonghua courses for international students at upper intermediate level, i.e. CLCP3xxx, we have been using textbooks published elsewhere, mostly in mainland China and the United States. For CLCP3323 and CLCP3353, as the topics are on Chinese culture, history and society, etc., the textbooks published elsewhere always cover topics like the Great Wall, Forbidden City, Terracotta warriors and horses excavated in Xi’an, and so on, and when the theme is traditional festivals, those textbooks always focus on the customs of northern China. For students learning Chinese in Hong Kong, what they learn in books has little to do with their actual living environment. As Hong Kong itself has an extremely rich cultural, historical and social issues that can be explored and discussed, but rarely covered in Chinese as a second language textbooks, this project will develop new textbooks to fill the existing gaps.
11.	‘Introduction and Application of Dignity Dining’ Through Innovative Workshops: A Novel and Pioneering Approach to Create Awareness and Compassion on Elderly Care in Medical Students	· The Medical Council of Hong Kong requires all medical students, admitted to the two local medical schools, to receive adequate Bioethics learning starting from Year 1 to promote moral development and ethical decision making. In CUHK, the majority of first year medical students are directly admitted from secondary schools at the age of around 18 years old. They are all required to learn about various bioethical issues through didactic lectures and topic-specific tutorials in a yearly bioethics course. · One ongoing challenge, that has been further exacerbated by the COVID pandemic, is that students often lack enough life experience, genuine interest and compassion that is required to understand complex ethical and societal implications of some medical and public health issues. · Elderly care is one such example. · Aging is a global issue and medical students have all the reasons to prepare themselves better for this population. Our current teaching method is not effective enough to engage our students to ‘see and feel the multiple issues of elderly patients’. In our preliminary survey study (sample size = 101) to identify students’ views on the elderly and their perceptions towards elderly care in Hong Kong, we understood that most respondents rated 'fragile (69%), lonely (66%) and weak (60%)' as their top views about the elderly. They perceived that elderly care in Hong Kong had 'lack of care (67%), no privacy (45%) and no dignity (39%)'. Another important finding is that more than half (59%) of student respondents never had any experience of taking care of the elderly. It is an undeniable fact that patients expect compassionate care and that it is a professional obligation of all healthcare professionals including our future doctors. · Our team aims to engage and inspire first year medical students where they can 'see, learn, feel and judge by doing' through innovative 'Dignity Dining' Softmeal Workshops. Here they will learn how to make dim sum softmeal for elderly patients who have dementia with dysphagia (swallowing difficulty). · The idea for these workshops came from an interesting fact shared by some dedicated healthcare staff who work in local elderly homes. They mentioned that despite dementia, elderly people have a very keen and sharp memory of going to yum cha and eating dim sum with their friends and families. Going to yum cha is a cultural phenomenon for many ethnic Chinese in Hong Kong. It isn’t difficult to imagine that for elderly patients with swallowing problems who are stuck with mashed softmeal every day, it must be monotonous and unappealing and adversely affecting their quality of life. · The two Principal Supervisors of this application proposal have initiated one such workshop in May 2023 with Project Futurus which is an award-receiving social enterprise that advocates dignity dining with a small group of medical students. It was an eye-opening experience for both teachers and student attendees. We learnt a lot from this workshop and its accompanying studio tour about the concept of smart aging. The workshop was very well received with excellent feedback and pre- and post-workshop survey data analysis showing a very significant increase in awareness regarding dignity dining and elderly care. · We have an ambitious aim to demonstrate with evidence that such workshops, if run on a consistent basis, should form part of our future medical curriculum given its multiple beneficial outcomes. Moreover, Sensory Restaurant on Wheels (流動五感大茶樓) experience will allow students to apply what they have learnt from the workshop and develop communication skills through serving the elderly. It is a win-win situation that allows the elderly in care homes who have long been isolated since COVID-19 to pick up the joy of community and dignity dining and allows students to learn to serve and apply their knowledge and skills, ultimately cultivating compassion. ·
12.	GenAI Playground: Developing Traceable and Responsible Student Uses of Generative AI for Education	Generative AI’s (GenAI) such as ChatGPT have taken the world by storm, with the education sector responding to the challenges of integrity and ethics as well as the opportunities offered. We still have little understanding of how such generative AI’s are used by students, particularly in a classroom setting. This innovation will introduce a transparent and responsible use of AI into our classrooms for both students and teachers to learn together. We will design a “GenAI Playground” as a dedicated station in a variety of classroom settings including the anatomy laboratory, small group tutorials in physiology and ethical discussion classes in bioethics. This project will combine our traditional learning resources such as human anatomy models, scenario-based dilemmas or clinical case vignettes and a computer connected to a GenAI. Using a live, internet connected GPT model which is permitted for use in Hong Kong (Bing AI, based on the GPT-4 model), this station will serve as a sandbox for our students to explore the subject with a new form of study companion. Importantly, the chat-logs of GPT will give us important insight into how the students use the GenAI, what kinds of questions they ask and their learning processes. This project promotes transparent and traceable GenAI learning, and will help us to deploy AI technologies with a better understanding of their role, forming a foundation for co-design of AI-integrated learning tasks for students.
13.	Using Contextualized Mathematics Problems to Increase Students' Knowledge from the Secondary to Freshman Level	Build an online contextualized-problem/project-based platform as a literacy strategy for improving/strengthening the first year mathematical knowledge and representations of real-life situations that are used in freshmen course studies and their related courses using visualization tools, symbolic solvers, chat box media and sound recording software. Build a computational literacy learning strategy/environment that grounds mathematics problems in real-life contexts using the synthetic and real data and where they are solved using algorithms (step-by-step procedures) and learning-by-doing activities. Offer a personalized experience on how to transition from a mathematical context to a fictional context to a realistic context, where students are able to split up the designed contextualized-problem/project into sub-problems and review their basic mathematical knowledge and problem solving skills, and increase students' knowledge from the secondary to freshman level.
14.	Using AI Meeting Assistants to Support First-Year Students in English-Medium Lectures – Application Research and Teaching Practice	This project explores the potential of AI Meeting Assistants (AIMAs) to enhance student comprehension and engagement in English-medium lectures at CUHK. AIMAs are AI-powered tools designed for meeting support, offering automatic transcription, captioning, and notetaking. CUHK has a diverse student body of over 8,000 non-local students from 70+ countries, with English as the primary medium of instruction. Students from Chinese Medium of Instruction (CMI) secondary schools or non-English speaking backgrounds may struggle with English-medium lectures, and those with hearing impairments may require additional resources for notetaking. AIMAs’ real-time captions and notetaking capabilities present solutions to these challenges. This study investigates AIMAs in face-to-face teaching, focusing on software and user experience evaluation. The software evaluation assesses AIMAs using ISO/IEC 25010 criteria, prices, sustainability, and scalability. The best AIMA for lectures will be selected using a multi-criteria decision-making algorithm. User experience evaluation will combine quantitative data on participation and satisfaction with qualitative insights from interviews. This study aligns with the funding’s objective of helping first-year students transition from secondary to university education and CUHK Strategic Plan 2021–2025’s goal of fostering global competence and engagement. Findings will provide insights into AIMAs’ potential to enhance face-to-face teaching and support students with language challenges.