How to reimagine an existing subject

General education subjects, known as “cluster-area requirements” (CAR) subjects, aim to broaden students’ world views and equip them with interdisciplinary and transferable skills, such as communication and technological competence. 

With the intention of bringing immersive technologies and student co-creation into subject pedagogy at Hong Kong Polytechnic UNniversity (PolyU), we have made use of a CAR subject, one highly relevant to daily life and workplace encounters, to try to bring about a dissemination effect to other subjects. We reformed the subject assessment tasks by integrating social media and immersive technologies to simulate real-life environments. This involves virtual teams co-creating learning content and providing space for student peer sharing and peer grading via the use of educational platforms. 

In addition, input from senior-year students drives sustainable improvements in the pedagogy and technological aspects for junior cohorts, forming an award-winning model of student-staff partnership, recognised by the QS Reimagine Education Regional Silver Awards 2023.

Reformation of a subject

In 2022, the authors began revamping the course From Gloom to Bloom: Global New Urbanism. The learning outcomes aim to equip students to identify urban issues, demonstrate sustainable urbanism principles globally and locally, and finally to implement green living strategies. International cities were mostly used as case studies, with little emphasis on the local context. Learning activities were primarily conducted in the classroom, and there was a strong emphasis on written assessments, such as project reports and self-reflection. The use of technology was minimal, and the delivery approach did not align with the daily experiences or learning behaviours of the current generation of students, nor with the demands of the modern workplace.

Planning by the interdisciplinary course team

The course team is formed of a subject matter expert supported by a digital learning specialist and a technical support team. Notably, the support team is from the digital native generation, with diverse backgrounds in computer science, information systems, creative media and instructional design. The team identified a misalignment between the course and the student experience, noting that the assessments did not reflect workplace or daily-life practices. 

• Interdisciplinarity makes us greater than the sum of our parts
• Seven lessons from interdisciplinary general education curriculum reform
• Start with why, part one: taking a new approach to curriculum development

To address this, the team rewrote the course content to include local components, incorporate field trips to Hong Kong’s rural areas and allow students to co-design field trips and co-create immersive videos. Additionally, they provided an online discussion platform and e-consultation opportunities to help students prepare for a multimodal presentation in PolyU’s hybrid immersive virtual environment, which is a six-sided cave automatic virtual environment facility. 

Partnering with students

Students play a critical ongoing role in co-designing the pedagogy, selecting appropriate e-learning tools and providing training and support to their peers. Input from students and recent graduates has been instrumental in identifying e-learning tools that align with student learning habits. 

For example, based on student recommendations, we adopted Padlet as a collaborative tool. Students also contribute to designing immersive video production training sessions, collaborating with teachers during field trips and co-creating video learning content with them. This collaborative approach has made the course both more engaging and practical.

Pass it on

Often, student experiences cannot be easily transferred to subsequent cohorts. This is particularly true in a CAR subject, where students come from different disciplines and cohorts, resulting in a lack of close peer bonding. If not planned properly, student helpers graduate without passing their experiences on to the next student cohort. 

In the support team, we mentored the first generation of student helpers who may not have studied the subject before. The following year, we recruited students from the previous cohort who have successfully completed the subject. Over the past two years, we have employed two graduating student helpers as full-time support staff members. This approach ensures that the course model remains dynamic in terms of pedagogical and technical support, allowing wisdom and experience to be systematically inherited and renewed.

In the project “Immersive learning on the run: student-staff partnership for technology-facilitated ubiquitous learning”, which won the 2023 QS Reimagine Education Silver Award (Asia region), we have consolidated the innovative spirit of the revised subject into a framework that we have named TIMS – technological innovation x interdisciplinary collaboration x multimodal assessment x student-staff partnership. We believe TIMS is a direction for 21st-century education, because it allows flexibility and interactive content to materialise from the two most important stakeholders of the learning and teaching process – the students and the teachers. We are thrilled to continue in this direction and hope to consolidate more evidence and recognition to contribute to the future of education.

Kai Pan Mark is senior educational development manager at the Educational Development Centre and Wai Chi Rodney Chu is senior lecturer in the department of applied social sciences, both at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

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