Professor Ricky Kwok was asked to be the Chairman of the Working Group on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on an interim basis last April. He was later on invited to be the Associate Vice-President (Teaching and Learning) who is charged to take the lead in e-learning initiatives at HKU. His predecessor, Professor George Tham from the Department of Civil Engineering, was at the helm for nine months when the University was searching for a new Vice-President.
Ricky speaking on e-learning at an induction programme for new staff this January
“I must thank the Provost Professor Roland Chin and the new VP (Teaching and Learning) Professor Ian Holliday for their trust in giving me this unique opportunity to take care of a host of plans to integrate e-learning in many aspects of our academic endeavors - from Moodle and Panopto to SPOCs and MOOCs. The Dean’s support was also instrumental,” says Ricky, “I am intrinsically motivated and am convinced that it is a most exciting time for education – not because of the advancements in technologies per se, but all the unprecedented opportunities they bring about to transform learning.”
To gain full value from technologies, Ricky feels that the existing modes of teaching and learning have to be enriched through innovative means and learning analytics more intentionally. “Technologies are great vehicles, but where they fit into learning processes can vary enormously. To maximize the potential we are not only digitizing teaching materials – like how we transposed lecture notes to powerpoints some 15 years ago – but also closely examining the new literacies required of our students in the technology-mediated world.” Ricky also hopes that all new initiatives could better align with the University’s strategic priorities, “so that our efforts devoted to e-learning are not distractions, but solutions to our core missions, head-on.”
It takes time to come to grips with all e-learning issues though. Some challenges in the Faculty of Engineering as well as in the University include engaging students in more collaborative and interactive forms of learning, and helping teachers to understand the implications of a new educational environment where open-access contents are virtually everywhere for consumption in a myriad of forms. To this end, the Faculty is making progressive moves – it aims to embrace innovative teaching methodologies such as “flipping the classroom” in the next triennium.
Ricky is seeking to do his new job well with reference to three constituents of his career so far. One is his background in computer science, which instilled in him a quest for effective resources management. The second is his familiarity with teaching and learning when he chaired EEE’s Curriculum Development Committee from 2010-2014 – a time when the 4-year curriculum was launched, and the whole Faculty was preoccupied with accreditation activities. At that time, Ricky learnt a lot about the difficulties and constraints that teachers encounter in reforms. The third is his recent involvement in the Sciences of Learning Strategic Research Team where he works with a panel of experts from Science, Education and Social Sciences on interdisciplinary learning analytics projects. The idea is an exciting blend of parallel and distributed computing, peer-to-peer network science, education, cognitive science, and, of course, big data.
Now that the sound of incoming emails, text messages and skype calls punctuates Ricky’s workdays and weekends, it seems that he’s too busy to think about work-life balance. “Gym is still my top priority, but since I got into this venture, I had to come to terms with that. I really need to divide and conquer my tasks and run better algorithms in my work.” He adds that he’d very much hope to have the chance to preach his ideas on wellness and computational thinking to all his students.