Informal learning space (ILS) has increasingly become important for higher education. Yet, most studies were conducted on a piecemeal basis, without considering the planning of the campus. This study adopts a systematic and data-driven approach in understanding the types of ILS, preferences and behaviors using a case study in Hong Kong, by first…

Private tutoring, or shadow education, has become a widespread phenomenon globally. Its growth can be attributed to the expansion of cram schools offering live and video tutoring. This study critically analyses students' perceptions of video-recorded classes. Specifically, it problematises students' preference for video-recorded classes by…

This paper covers the work in progress of an e-platform being developed for language enhancement at a tertiary institution in Hong Kong. There is an actual or perceived concern about the English and Chinese language ability of undergraduate students at certain universities in Hong Kong. One reason for this is that a significant proportion of…

Teaching the concepts of expert systems to accounting students is often challenging, not only because these students are not equipped with the necessary technical knowledge to comprehend the concepts taught, but also due to the other various constraints (e.g., limited teaching hours and a diverse background of the students' undergraduate…

Online learning has become a ubiquitous part of the educational landscape and how teachers are supported in developing approaches to teaching online is a fundamental aspect of the students' learning experience. Based on the implementation of a professional development course on becoming an online teacher offered in a blended learning mode at one…

This paper is a report of a cross-cultural online collaboration between two cohorts of pre-service teachers in Hong Kong, China and an American university in St. Paul, Minnesota. It explicates the pedagogical design and implementation of online tools for group collaboration and students' perceptions of the benefits and challenges. Multiple…

This study aimed to develop a corpus-aided pronunciation teacher-training programme and examine the effectiveness of a corpus-aided pronunciation teaching approach in English classrooms in Hong Kong. A workshop was conducted for 86 participants to introduce several English learner corpora. After the workshop, eight volunteer participants,…

The literature on how to develop competence in giving academic presentations (AP) (e.g. Zappa-Hollman, 2007) shows that apart from basic communication skills (i.e. the ability to speak accurately, fluently and appropriately), university students are expected to perform specific roles and develop advanced skills for intellectual exchange and the…

The paper reports on a collaborative project on fostering cross-cultural online discussion between two universities with one in Hong Kong and the other in Taiwan. Two online platforms--Moodle as a formal channel for course-related discussion and Facebook as an informal channel for social-oriented interaction--were employed. The study pays special…

As one of the essential skills for success in work and studies, English communication is often made a key component in the GE curriculum of tertiary study programmes. In addition to the provision of required English proficiency courses, many tertiary institutions have established English centres of some description to promote English learning on…

Flipping the classroom is a current pedagogical innovation in many schools and universities. Although interest in flipped classroom (or Inverted Classroom) continues to grow, its implementation so far has been driven more by teachers' intuitive beliefs, rather than empirically-based principles. Many studies merely replace in-class instructions…

This paper reports on a collective case study of three blended courses taught by different instructors in a higher education institution, with the purpose of identifying the different types of blend and how the blend supports student learning. Based on the instructors' and students' interviews, and document analysis of course outlines, two major…

This paper presents an evaluation study of an innovative and theory-based initial teacher education course entitled Learning Study, the aim of which is to develop the instructional design and teaching competency of pre-service teachers in Hong Kong. The Learning Study course is offered to all second year students as part of the Bachelor of…

This article reports a study of eLearning in 21 courses in Hong Kong universities that had a blended design of face-to-face classes combined with online learning. The main focus of the study was to examine possible relationships between features of online learning designs and student learning outcomes. Data-collection strategies included expert…

Dynamic concepts are difficult to explain in traditional media such as still slides. Animations seem to offer the advantage of delivering better representations of these concepts. Compared with static images and text, animations can present procedural information (e.g. biochemical reaction steps, physiological activities) more explicitly as they…