Thematic Session II

To facilitate the learning interests of students in library and information studies (LIS) discipline. The production of Virtual Reality library tours 360o were achieved in early 2017. They can exhibit the interiors of libraries vividly.  By putting on the VR headsets, LIS students can ‘walk through’ and ‘look around’ the library without physical visit. The VR library tours can also be used as the teaching aids to explain different concepts on library physical design, services and facilities through face-to-face instruction. They were also converted into e-learning course materials by adding point-to-point pop-up notes. One set of notes on library services was tagged to guide students on how to conduct e-library tour for new library users and the other set on the checklist for library design.

“Use a picture. It‘s worth a thousand words” ¹. Now “Use a virtual reality video for teaching, it is worth UNLIMITED words”.

^{1 ‘}Speakers Give Sound Advice’. Syracuse Post Standard. page 18. March 28, 1911.

Online teaching has increasingly become an important teaching mode in higher education institutions. The purpose of this paper was to explore and develop a four-part model of online teachers’ capability building model in traditional higher education institutions, using Chu Hai College of Higher Education (Chu Hai College) as a case, that includes Platform, Activity, Resources, and Tools, which is called the PART model.

First, the platform is the infrastructure for delivering online teaching, which includes functions of course content, learning, communication and collaboration, assignment and assessment, administration and management, and evaluation. Based upon the latest version of Moodle platform, we customized and integrated a set of different web 2.0 and social networking tools into the platform, including wiki, blog, RSS, virtual classroom, etc. Meanwhile, the College terminated the co-existence of other learning management system and enforced the adoption of the Moodle platform for all the courses. We tentatively called it the stage of enforcement.

Second, one of the major characteristics of online teaching is interactivity. We encouraged the teachers to take full advantage of the numerous ways to engage students actively. The students were able to interact with the reading materials, courseware, video clips, fellow students and teachers, and the students are provided a set of different tools in this regard, including chat, forum, email, message, comments, rating, voting, questionnaire, to name but a few. This may be called the stage of encouragement.

Third, open educational resources (OERs) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. OERs include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge. We briefed the teachers about the basics of the OERs, including its definition, development status quo and benefits, and some major OERs projects and search engines/tools. Most importantly we explored with the teachers on how to integrate OERs to improve the effectiveness of teaching. This may be called the stage of integration.

Last but not least, most likely the available platform functions, activities and resources may not satisfy the demand of individual courses, so online teachers need to have the ability of creating interactive online resources and activities, using the open and free tools to design and create the functions, activities and resources that meet their needs. We may call this the stage of empowerment.

It is hoped that this PART model and four stage strategy presented in this paper can provide a benchmark for traditional higher education institutions to build their teachers’ online teaching capabilities.

Keywords: Online Teaching, Capability Building, PART Model

The Dietetics, Food and Nutritional Sciences (DFNS) subject group is offering the BSc (Hons) Food and Nutrition programme, in collaboration with the University of Ulster, UK. The lecturers include both academic staff from local and overseas universities, and professionals from the hospitals and industry. We use different E-learning applications to improve the quality of learning and to facilitate difficulties encountered in teaching.

The programme is delivered via the face-to-face mode with the assistance of the SOUL platform. Various functions of SOUL, which include the assignment submission, choice and Turnitin assignment, have been integrated to the daily practice of this programme. Moreover, the Virtual Classroom platform was employed for expert guest lecturers with from overseas (example from Kings College, London), who unfortunately could not come to Hong Kong. Recently, our IT team is helping us to develop the AR/VR mobile APPs to enhance the leaning experience in some challenging science subjects.

The presenter will share her experience using online learning in a College-level writing course. Making use of the resources on the Internet and the interactive nature of online platforms, the teacher developed a course which encourage students to write to share their thoughts, as well as to respond and comment on others’ writing. ​The presentation will address three aspects: (1) The rationale of designing a writing course in blended learning mode; (2) the benefits of using blended learning from the teacher and the students’ perspectives and (3) the challenges faced by the teachers and the students.