Abstracts of Teaching Development and Language Enhancement Grant for 2022-25 Triennium (Inter-institutional Collaborative Activities (IICA) Portion)

No.	Project Title	Abstract
1.	Building a Collaborative Platform for Enhancing Artificial Intelligence Applications in Higher Education	· Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized many industries, and its applications in education is a rapidly emerging field. · Despite the promising potentials, there remains substantial barriers preventing broader use AI in higher education, such as high upfront financial investment, time-consuming collaboration between educators and software developers, as well as ethical and social concerns. · This project proposes a collaborative platform for enhancing AI applications in education to lower the entry barriers for educators to develop or apply AI tools in higher education. · The proposed platform will consist of educators interested in developing or applying AI tools for education purposes, as well as technical experts experienced in turning ideas into usable tools. It serves to establish a collaborative community of educators to foster an ecosystem of AI development and applications in education. · The platform aims to achieve the following objectives: 1. Share existing applications of AI across higher education sector in Hong Kong 2. Scale up existing AI tools developed by collaborating institutions to enable more users 3. Produce online resources to educate users about the AI tools 4. Evaluate students’ and teachers’ perceptions toward the use of AI in education by collecting evidence on its benefits and challenges
2.	An AI Media Analytics Framework for Course Assessments	In the past, traditional course assessment methodologies have been used to evaluate teacher and course performance. However, given the rapid development of innovative technologies and social changes, plus the high adoption rate of Virtual Teaching and Learning (VTL) during the Covid-19 Pandemic Lockdown, there are many new challenges for institutes and teachers to consider when performing course assessments, including: · Processing heterogeneous data types · Handling a large volume of data · Producing unbiased and objective assessments · Containing labor-intensive and manual processes · Assessing multiple students’ performance in VTL In light of these challenges, there is a need to build an AI-served assessment platform to fill gaps in the current state of course assessments. The proposed solutions are as follows: · Develop an Artificial Intelligence (AI) served assessment platform for automating workflows and helping teachers evaluate a large volume of inputs in VTL · Use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to handle textual input, such as sentiment analysis for classifying forum content into positive, neutral, or negative feedback, machine translation to handle bilingual content, and entity extraction to obtain keywords within the textual content. State-of-the-art pre-trained models are used in NLP to provide fair and accurate outputs in a cost-effective way · Apply different content retrieval mechanisms to obtain data from various data types, such as speech recognition for extracting textual data from video content and optical character recognition for extracting data from graphical content These proposed solutions should bring out the following benefits: · Facilitate comprehensive course review and further improve course quality · Reduce teacher and administrator workload on manual assessment processes · Shorten assessment cycles and help teachers apply related changes to improve students’ satisfaction in VTL · Increase course performance and improve the reputation of institutes over time
3.	Developing a Systematized Humour Pedagogical Approach to Enhance Teaching and Learning: A Cross-institutional and Cross-disciplinary Collaboration	COVID-19 is exerting tremendous stress on students globally, which affects students’ performance and presents a clear threat to education worldwide. One way to relieve students’ stress is by incorporating humour into teaching to create a more enjoyable learning environment. Humour relaxes students and helps with emotional venting. Humour is also known to be associated with positive emotions, which is known to enhance learning and memory via the stimulation of biogenic amine productions in the nervous system. Although humour is a common characteristic of many successful teachers, not every teacher is humourous, and not every humourous teacher has good student engagement. Furthermore, the outcomes of spontaneous humour are difficult to predict. Hence, we are developing a standardized humour pedagogical system – “Planned Humour Incorporation System for Teaching and Learning Enhancement” (PHISTLE) – manifested within the framework of the cognitivism learning theory, so that we can consistently generate positive outcomes that are predictable and replicable. Previously, we implemented PHISTLE in the field of biomedical sciences, and incorporated 17 different humour contents into the lectures of six courses at HKU to improve students’ learning experience. Our results indicated that the system promoted student engagement, enhanced learning, and relieved stress. In this project, we will expand the application of PHISTLE beyond the field of biomedical sciences and implement it in a cross-discipline manner among CUHK, CityU, HKBU, HKU and PolyU, which would apply PHISTLE in the fields of life sciences, language and corporate communication. To evaluate PHISTLE’s effectiveness, we will distribute questionnaires, conduct interviews and invite students to submit reflective journals. We expect PHISTLE to reduce stress, promote student-teacher rapport and social cohesion, and enhance students’ experiential learning experience across disciplines. The collected information will help us to further refine PHISTLE, formulate a teacher’s guide for appropriate usages of humour in teaching, create an online repository for sharing and searching of humour materials for teaching, and establish a community of practice among the participating universities.
4.	The Student Learning Experience in Hong Kong Universities: A Deep Dive into Institutional Data	Different universities in Hong Kong have their own institutional data to gauge student satisfaction of their learning experience and environment and perceived attainment of the university graduate attributes. These questionnaires are all underpinned by an outcomes-based approach to student learning. Through a data science approach to secondary analysis of these institutional data and qualitative interviews with students and teachers, this collaborative study is designed to enhance the overall student experience in their programmes of study offered by their respective UGC funded universities in the midst of the new normal by addressing the following questions: · How satisfied are students with their programmes of study? · To what extent do Hong Kong undergraduate students achieve their respective university educational aims? · What are the enablers and barriers to student satisfaction and attainment of university educational aims? Evidence-based recommendations to improve quality of teaching and learning will be proposed. Due to the confidential nature of the data, each participating university will undertake their own data collection and data analyses and no cross-institutional sharing of data will be done. A common analysis framework and guidelines will be developed. Common findings and best practices will be shared and disseminated through an inter-institutional symposium, institutional wide workshops of each participating university, sector-wide sharing sessions, conference presentations, etc.
5.	Enhancing Learning and Teaching of Digital Citizenship Through Scenario-based AR Learning Trails	· The digital culture emerging since the early two decades of the 21st century has been profoundly reshaping our economy, society and education. · Despite its uncontroversial contributions, rapid digital development also brought about negative consequences, such as hacking, bullying, identity theft, technology addiction, privacy invasion, gaming disorder and digital disarray. · Hence, it is imperative to prepare students for communicating and collaborating safely and responsibly in digital environments, which sheds light on the importance of promoting Digital Citizenship education. · Building upon the success of an earlier joint-university undertaking in using AR learning trails to advance learning and teaching of academic integrity and ethics, the proposed project aims to enhance the learning and teaching of Digital Citizenship through development of scenario-based AR learning trails. Specifically, it has the following objectives: (1) To develop an updated conceptual framework for learning and teaching of Digital Citizenship which is suited to the contemporary era (2) To develop scenario-based learning trails and relevant educational materials by involving students as partners (3) To develop and deliver professional development for teachers in collaboration with interested partners, and disseminate project outcomes via academic platforms (4) To develop resources website for storage, sharing and sustainability of project outcomes.
6.	Nurturing Global Citizenship Through English (NGCE)	The concept global citizenship is embedded in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. It refers to the sense of belonging to not only a specific local community but to the larger national and global community through understanding it, participating in it, and working with others to make it more peaceful, sustainable and fairer; it is a community that is diverse yet interdependent and interconnected. Educational institutions have been charged with the responsibility to promote global citizenship by engaging their students as contributing members of the larger global community with their skills and education (United Nations Academic Impact, 2022). “Nurturing Global Citizenship through English (NGCE)” puts meaningful language learning and practice in the context of global themes including intercultural communication, respect for diversity, employment, and media and technology. The project also aligns well with the Global Engagement theme in our CUHK’s 2021-2025 strategic plan where learning opportunities are created for our students to be exposed to diverse cultures, inclusive mindsets, and knowledge and skills needed for both academic success and responsible global citizenship in the 21st century. Deliverables are four online learning modules which can be studied independently by all eligible users#, or adopted by eligible teachers/ units as supporting (course) materials. (200 words) # all CUHK students and students in collaborating universities
7.	Computational Thinking (CT) as a Problem-solving Skill – A Multidisciplinary Virtual Learning Package	Computational Thinking (CT) is considered to be an essential skill for 21st century learners no matter what fields they are in as they have to use some form of digital tools to solve problems. In developed economies, CT has been incorporated into their K-12 curricula. Many Asian countries are reforming their education frameworks to include CT in their education frameworks. In Hong Kong, the Education Bureau has updated the syllabus of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to include CT and Python programming for students sitting for the HKDSE 2025 and onwards. However, when we survey our local university programmes, CT training is still not very common for undergraduates. Considering the difficulties to establish a new standalone course in the existing undergraduate programmes, we propose to deliver a virtual learning package for students to learn on their own’s schedule and at their own pace. In our learning package, we extend CT to a diverse range of contexts and fields so as to demonstrate the power of CT as a problem-solving paradigm. Hence, we have elaborated case studies contributed from different universities in various fields by different subject experts, such as creative, computing, finance, science and social science. This compensates the current shortcomings of most CT teaching materials concentrating on coding only. At CUHK, in particular, we shall focus on the fields of cognitive and behavioral sciences, risk management, FinTech and InsurTech.