When the Hong Kong government first funded?, a blended learning experiment between four local universities, it couldn¡¯t have known how prescient that investment would be in the Covid-19 era.

Since 2018, the project has allowed students to take for-credit courses taught by partner universities via a combination of online and in-person classes. The participating institutions ¨C the University of Hong Kong (HKU),?The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology,?Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) ¨C had to work together to find solutions to technological, scheduling and other logistic hurdles.?Currently, the project has 11 courses taken by 2,000 students, but is looking to expand.

¡°Obviously, when we decided to fund this project, we had absolutely no idea how the spread of Covid-19 would disrupt the higher education sector to such an extent,¡± James Tang, secretary-general of the University Grants Committee, said during an e-symposium organised by HKU.

Professor Tang announced that the UGC was increasing funding for its Teaching Development and Language Enhancement Grant, a striking move when public education is facing cuts around the world. The budget for this grant will increase by 52?per cent in the 2019-2022 triennium, bringing the total over three years to HK$781.2 million (?81.4 million).

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Ian Holliday, vice-president and pro vice-chancellor (teaching and learning) at HKU, said that Responsive4U set the scene for many of the changes that had been made due to campus closures and a quick shift to online learning. ¡°Three years ago, we started to experiment with some of the issues we¡¯re suddenly dealing with because of Covid,¡± he said.

Ricky Kwok, a HKU engineering professor and Response4U¡¯s project leader, called the initiative ¡°a stress test for genuine collaboration between institutions¡±. It is also a way to ¡°push the envelope in terms of the systemic arrangements for courses¡±.

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Even the project¡¯s marketing, which uses anime-type characters depicting the different institutions, is different?to traditional university promotion.

¡°We have some crazy ideas,¡± Professor Kwok said. ¡°Conventional ways of organising teaching are being seriously challenged. We want to decouple content from time and space.¡± He also wanted to ¡°transcend course, departmental or even institutional boundaries¡±.

For example, live taught sessions may no longer need to include didactic teaching. Those classes can be completed with pre-recorded videos, which frees up classroom time for active learning.

And with ¡°compressed modes of teaching¡±, didactic learning could be limited to three or four intensive weeks of online instruction. ¡°Students like to binge-watch videos,¡± Professor Kwok joked.?That would leave the remaining 10 weeks of a semester for exchanges, experiential learning, or service in the community.

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Chetwyn Chan, associate vice-president (learning and teaching) at PolyU, said that future plans could involve HyFlex, or hybrid-flexible, models, in which each class would have both online and face-to-face versions, which would run in parallel. ¡°Students could jump back and forth between the virtual and the physical,¡± he said.

However, he added that these initiatives were more demanding on lecturers, and required additional resources and teacher training.

Several of the speakers at HKU¡¯s online event said that Responsive4U¡¯s intra-institutional exchanges, even between campuses within the same city, were valuable experiences for students.

¡°PolyU¡¯s focus is on professional education, so our students don¡¯t always have the opportunity to be exposed to people outside these professions,¡± Professor Chan said. ¡°General education courses are quite new to us, and this project gives our students a wider choice.¡±

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The most popular Responsive4U course so far is The Science of Crime Investigation, which uses an augmented reality app to recreate a CSI-type crime scene. Students can play a game to solve a crime based on evidence?including weapons and autopsies.?

Wincy Chan, one of the course¡¯s lecturers from the HKU pathology department, said that her experience with Responsive4U was helpful after Covid-19 hit and campuses were closed. ¡°It made the unexpected transition to online learning much smoother,¡± she said.

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She also used the opportunity to find a solution to a situation that vexes almost all teachers with large classes. ¡°We got so tired of answering the same questions over and over, ?so we created a chatbot???,¡± she said. ¡°They can ask 1,000 questions without exhausting the bot.¡±

joyce.lau@timeshighereducation.com