Speakers

Title: Nurturing Whole Persons in a Technology-Driven World: Success Stories from Hong Kong Baptist University

Presenter: Franklin Luk

Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) is dedicated to delivering Whole Person Education (WPE). Our WPE ethos aims to nurture students to becoming responsible citizens and caring leaders who possess discipline knowledge and generic skills, including IT skills, which will help them succeed in meeting the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.

With the University's emphasis on WPE and learning technology integration, we strive to provide an educational experience that will cultivate our future generations to assist in overcoming the world's pressing issues. For quality enhancement purposes, it is important to make use of technology to record the development of our students, alongside the reporting of students' academic achievements.

Gathering evidence of student learning is at the forefront of today's higher education initiatives. There is a pressing need to collect direct evidence of student learning for quality assurance and enhancement to address the issue of public accountability. In recent years, HKBU has been piloting various evidence collection exercises to ascertain that our academic and co-curricular programmes are helping students in achieving the HKBU's Graduate Attributes (GAs), with a view to enhancing student learning and making continuous improvements. This is also central to the entire implementation of the outcomes-based approach for student learning.

Currently, HKBU is consolidating such mechanisms into a holistic assessment of students' achievement of GAs - WPE Assessment. Basically, our WPE assessment adopts the standard triangulation of data/evidence with different sources of direct and indirect evidence of student learning collected from:

1. students' academic work;
2. students' results in standardised tests;
3. indirect evidence from a questionnaire completed by students; and
4. students' individual electronic learning portfolios.

Leveraging on e-learning technology, these elements together form a reliable mechanism to assess WPE at HKBU.

This plenary will highlight some preliminary encouraging results of how HKBU provides students with a liberal and holistic education that fosters whole person development. We will share our experience of HKBU's adoption of various e-tools to assist the University's direct and indirect evidence collection on student learning for WPE assessment.