e-Learning Strategic Plan 2010-2015 A Final Report 20 July 2015 (version 1.2)
Introduction The e-Learning Strategic Plan 2010-2015 was developed by the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) and the Office of Education Development and Gateway Education (EDGE) to support the University’s then 2010-2015 Strategic Plan, the IT Strategic Plan 2010-2015, and the Academic Development Proposal 2012-2015. The e-Learning Strategic Plan 2010-2015 identified five strategic goals – (1) provide transformational change to support DEC, (2) leverage technology for Gateway Education, (3) enable next-generation e-learning, (4) cultivate IT-savvy professionals, and (5) ensure quality e-learning. The following highlights some of the key achievements in each of those strategic goals.
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e-Learning Strategic Plan 2010-2015 – A Final Report
Goal #1. Provide Transformational Change to Support the DEC “We believe technology provides the transformational change needed for achieving the goals of our Discovery-Enriched Curriculum.” The Discovery-Enriched Curriculum (DEC) empowers every CityU student to make an original discovery. To provide stimulating teaching/learning environments that are conducive to innovation, we introduced lecture capture solution in 2009 and mobile learning in 2011, enabling the adoption of blended-learning and flipped-classroom approaches. Our lecture capturing solution, Echo360, not only facilitates shifting of lectures to before/after classes but also permits student presentations outside class time. With a kick-off fund by the Provost, mobile learning adopters have sprouted from only hundreds of students to the majority of the student population. The practice of mobile learning extends from classroom assessments to field studies to complete the loop of flipped classes. Survey results from 20141 revealed 73% of the responding students had experienced flipped classes and around half of this population agreed or strongly agreed flipped classroom approaches made classes more engaging and enhance learning. With high acceptance in flipping the classes, the concept of learning by leveraging technology will percolates to student life for anywhere anytime discovery. The breadth and depth of use are equally important in the application of e-learning to enable transformational success. According to annual surveys on students’ perception about the overall usage level of the learning management system(LMS)2, a gradual shift from “minimal, supplemental and integral” use to “central and exclusive” use from 2011 to 2014 can be observed (see Fig.1).
Figure 1: Overall Usage Level of LMS (2011-2014)
1 http://go.cityu.hk/q0ncwm 2 Gandell, T., Weston, C., Finkelstein, A. & Weiner, L. (2000) Appropriate use of the web in teaching higher education, in: B. L. Mann (Ed.) Perspectives in web course management (pp. 61-68). Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press.
e-Learning Strategic Plan 2010-2015 – A Final Report
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In line with Central IT’s “cloud first” strategy and to take advantage of cost effectiveness of cloud, a full scale evaluation on cloud-based LMS in software-as-a-service (SaaS) model was commenced in 2013 to identify a better solution for the coming five to ten years. In 2015, Canvas by Instructure was selected as our future unified LMS platform as it was more preferred by faculty and students to replace Blackboard. The need to shut down 48 hours for an upgrade is now history when Canvas provides new features and updates in every 30 days with mostly zero down time. Students now enjoy the linkage from Canvas to various cloud-based services such as Dropbox, Twitter, and Skype to supplement e-learning needs, as illustrated in Figure 2, in addition to library e-resources and Google Docs which has been available for a few years. This learning environment is also transforming CityU students to future technology-savvy professionals to support Goal #4.
Figure 2: e-Learning Ecosystem at City University of Hong Kong (2015)
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e-Learning Strategic Plan 2010-2015 – A Final Report
Goal #2. Leverage Technology for Gateway Education “We believe technology is a strong enabler in the discovery and innovation process to support our D&I GE courses.” In 2012, we created three DEC Computing Labs3 as experimental classrooms-of-the-future to provide a stimulating environment for new types of pedagogies, such as flipped classroom. Furniture is rearrange-able, allowing students to dynamically form teams of ad hoc sizes. Teamwork is facilitated by work areas with monitors for sharing. Walls are writable surfaces to facilitate brainstorming and discussion, or posting of notes. Over a thousand students benefit from the labs yearly including participants in many CityU Apps Lab4 activities. To extend the benefit of interactive classroom to larger population, two Gateway Education Laboratories (GE Labs)5 were established in 2013. GE Lab 1 houses specialized equipment to support technology enhanced learning in GE courses, such as 3D printers/scanners for prototyping, scanning electron microscope (SEM) to help students explore the micro/nano world, etc. A digital show-andtell studio allows students to showcase their discoveries and polish their presentation skills. GE Lab 2 provides an active learning space that can easily be reconfigured for teamwork as well as hands-on GE activities and experiments which are forbidden in the DEC Labs. In the first year of operation, the GE Labs facilitated 140 teaching and learning activities for 2,079 students from 18 GE courses offered by 12 departments. Students’ innovative use of technology in the GE Labs is best demonstrated by winning of various awards. Mr Jacky Lai, a student from the Department of Electronic Engineering, received the first prize in the “Samsung Solve for Tomorrow” competition6 by designing a new energy-saving ventilation and air conditioning system, benefiting CityU to acquire $250,000 worth of teaching and learning equipment. Miss Ng Ka Ian won second prize in the Art and Architecture category of the Stratasys Extreme Redesign Challenge7 when she was a final-year student of Architectural Studies. Two Year 4 students in the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Miss Carman Yeung and Miss Cacin Wong, collected the prestigious Drury Medal (for the best entry in the under-25 category)8 . Two teams of CityU engineering students were awarded the championship and the 2nd runner–up titles in the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers (HKIE) Joint Institutes Competition9. Furthermore, we also learn the student prospective of leveraging GE Labs supported technologies from entries in the “I Like Tech@CityU” student contest10. From building mobile apps to designing 3D printing system for construction, CityU students truly prove their technology proficiency for their future careers through the GE support.
3 http://go.cityu.hk/j0jgrr 4 http://appslab.hk/ 5 http://www.cityu.edu.hk/edge/ge/lab.htm 6 https://support-hk.samsung.com/solvefortomorrow/en/winner.html 7 http://www.stratasys.com/industries/education/extreme-redesign/winners 8 http://wikisites.cityu.edu.hk/sites/newscentre/en/Pages/201504229000.aspx 9 http://wikisites.cityu.edu.hk/sites/newscentre/en/Pages/201506291415.aspx 10 http://www.cityu.edu.hk/elearn/i-like-tech.html
e-Learning Strategic Plan 2010-2015 – A Final Report
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Goal #3. Enable Next-Generation E-Learning “We believe formation of mobile-learning, social-learning and virtual-learning communities will be key directions for e-learning in the near future.” With growing popularity of tablets and smart phones, we began to promote mobile-learning by deploying the Blackboard Mobile Learn app in 2011. Within a couple of years, mobile app access to the LMS increased to around 6,000 daily with over 35,000 mobile devices (see Fig.3). A suite of new mobile apps were also implemented, including apps for online survey, QR code, remote PC desktop on iPad, e-book editing and viewing, mind mapping, cloud storage, and more; allowing teaching/ learning, collaboration and sharing anytime anywhere. To further promote the use of mobile apps and other innovative technologies for teaching, in 2012 we created two new grants – DEC Technology Adoption Grants for Teaching Innovation (TAGs) and DEC Mobile App Development Grants (MADGs). The grants provided financial support to faculty members when adopting new technology or mobile apps for teaching. Three rounds of funding were provided over 3 semesters; close to 30 TAG/MADG projects were funded, totally over HK$3 million. Some of the success stories have been depicted in the TAG and MADG Project Sharing Series11 published via the OCIO Newsletters.
Figure 3: Mobile Analytics (2012/13) The University understands team-work, knowledge sharing, and collaboration will be important for 21st century workforce as well as to support DEC-style learning. In 2010, we made available a suite of cloud-based collaboration services to staff and students through its launch of Google Apps for Education and Microsoft Live@edu for CityU. In 2013, we further offered Office 365 collaboration suite. O365 SharePoint Online as well as Yammer provides Facebook-like newsfeed to facilitate social-learning. All these solutions supplement the LMS to form the CityU e-learning ecosystem as indicated in Figure 2.
11 http://issuu.com/cityuhkocio/docs/newsletter_issue_14 http://issuu.com/cityuhkocio/docs/newsletter_issue_15 http://issuu.com/cityuhkocio/docs/newsletter_issue_16
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e-Learning Strategic Plan 2010-2015 – A Final Report
Goal #4. Cultivate IT-Savvy Professionals “We believe technology will play an important role in any future profession our students may want to pursue.� Under the CityU e-learning environment, students acquired a spectrum of IT skills to perform learning activities. In particular, the transformation of Echo360 from a lecture capture tool to a student presentation hub provides opportunities to apply their multimedia knowledge when reporting on project findings. With full adoption of Canvas as the unified LMS starting 2015, the built-in Media Recorder feature boosts the application of audio and video for learning within assignment submissions. Figure 4 illustrates the proliferation of media recordings for e-learning in recent academic years.
Figure 4: Growth of Media Records for e-Learning
In addition to functions and features available inside Canvas, CityU students used additional web services and mobile apps for their learning. The top ten tools used by our students in 2015 are tabulated in Table 1. The nature of these applications is highly diversified, from productivity tools to scholarly literature search engine. By comparing to the top-ten list provided by the teachers (Table 2), we believe many students are self-directed and self-sufficient in the employment of such tools when the adoption by teachers is relatively limited. In the same token, many CityU graduates will be able to leverage IT in their career development independently.
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Rank
Service/App
Nature of Service/App
Adoption Rate
1
Google Apps
Cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools
52.5%
2
Wikipedia
Cloud sourcing open-access encyclopedia
50.4%
3
YouTube
Video sharing website
48.6%
4
Google Search
Web search engine
46.7%
5
Mobile communication app
45.1%
6
Social networking service
41.4%
7
Dropbox
Cloud-based file hosting service
41.0%
8
Google Translate
Online language translation engine
35.5%
9
e-Resource in CityU Library
e-resources provided by CityU Library
32.5%
10
Google Scholar
Web search engine for scholarly literature contents
30.6%
Table 1: 2015 Top 10 Web Services / Mobile Apps Used by Students for Learning outside Canvas Beside technical skills, honesty is always one of the core attributes of a professional. At CityU, e-Learning not only supports delivery of an Academic Honesty Online Tutorial to all students, but also supplies Turnitin to prevent plagiarism. The use of Turnitin is always the autonomy of individual course instructors. Nevertheless, user account audit reveals almost all students have accessed Turnitin for assignment submissions. Rank
Service/App
Nature of Service/App
1
YouTube
Video sharing website
39.8%
2
Dropbox
Cloud-based file hosting service
24.3%
3
Google Apps
Cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools
22.3%
4
Google Search
Web search engine
19.4%
5
Wikipedia
Cloud sourcing open-access encyclopedia
18.5%
5
e-Resource in CityU Library
e-resources provided by CityU Library
18.5%
7
Google Scholar
Web search engine for scholarly literature contents
15.5%
8
TED Talks
Presentations emphasized in technology, entertainment & design available online
14.6%
9
Social networking service
9.7%
10
Mobile communication app
8.7%
Adoption Rate
Table 2: 2015 Top 10 Web Services / Mobile Apps Used by Teachers for Teaching outside Canvas
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e-Learning Strategic Plan 2010-2015 – A Final Report
Goal #5. Ensure Quality E-Learning “We believe benchmarking helps drive e-learning change, ensures quality, and positions the University globally.” The continuous upgrading of our e-learning systems is one of the means to ensure a robust and function-rich integrated e-learning environment. When evaluating e-learning options, we always lean towards the adoption of the very best e-learning solutions for our students. Therefore, we initiated an LMS Evaluation Project in 2013. Instructure Canvas was selected to replace Blackboard due to its intuitive user interface and the flexible cloud-based software-as-a-service model. An extended pilot in Semester A 2014/2015 was followed by a fully deployment in the subsequent semester. Analytics (Fig.5) showed that Canvas was used by around 24,000 students (practically all CityU/CCCU students) and 1,411 teachers in 1,611 courses in the particular semester. The utilization rate reached 80.4% which was consistent with long-term adoption rate of the previous Blackboard LMS. Based on these statistics, we can conclude that the LMS migration exercise as very successful. e-Learning systems will not be effective without acceptance from faculty members. Hence, we conduct e-learning user group forum annually to encourage sharing of the latest development and best practices among our teachers and students, and e-learning experts from other local tertiary institutions. To strengthen the connection between academic units and the e-Learning Team, the Departmental e-Learning Coordinator scheme was initiated in 2013. The coordinators have been highly cooperative in bridging the gap in communication, especially during the transition from Blackboard to Canvas.
Figure 5: Canvas Analytics for Semester B 2014/15 (Captured on 21 May 2015)
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Copyright Š 2015 City University of Hong Kong
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