With curriculum changes to support the 3-3-4 academic reform, the University has a rare opportunity to rethink and redesign how we provide and deliver education to our students to create a rewarding and unique CityU learning experience. The University has instigated a new “Discover & Innovate @ CityU” (D&I) campaign, designed to broaden our students’ minds and to challenge their creativity in an interdisciplinary manner through a technology-enriched learning experience.  

The D&I initiative is by no means limited to student learning, but spans all University functions from teaching, research to administration. It is fully in line with and supports the University’s new 2010-2015 Strategic Plan. IT of course plays a very important role in supporting D&I efforts and the new Discovery-enriched Curriculum (DEC) that the University is creating.  

For the IT organization, we are promoting discovery and innovation at several fronts. At the organization level, we are exploring new ways to optimize how we deliver our services, streamlining processes, and adopting modern service management standards. At the IT infrastructure level, we are building up our cloud computing capabilities and further strengthening the robustness of our operations, as well as support for high-performance computing. At the enterprise systems level, we are deploying new systems to streamline administrative and academic processes. 

The key benefactors from our IT D&I efforts are of course our students. Last year, we made available a suite of cloud applications and productivity tools, allowing students working at different locations, even different countries, to collaborative, communicate and share – through web conferencing, instant messaging, blogs, wikis, and shared documents, spreadsheets and presentation slides. 

For teaching and learning, the University plans to make extensive use of IT to maximize our students’ learning experience through a technology-rich e-learning environment. The University Strategic Plan states that we plan “to continuously upgrade our e-learning environment to ensure that our information technology platforms and systems are up to speed, able to keep pace with the technological competence of our students and to provide them with new models of learning to enhance effectiveness.” 

D&I and the DEC efforts ensure our students are well prepared for a knowledge-based society that is very much technology-oriented. It is obvious that technology is inseparable for practically all aspects of daily life, in how we communicate, share, collaborate, learn as well as work and play. With D&I, we will be providing a technology-enriched environment where students and teachers can easily and freely share ideas and collaborate among themselves and with each others. We see the ability to easily and quickly share information and collaborate to be an important aspect of the CityU experience. 

Our first step in this direction is to upgrade our mobile-learning capabilities for both in-class and out-of-class learning. In-class mobile-learning includes the use of mobile devices to promote student interaction and participation. For example, with mobile devices, students can easily share ideas, questions, links, and web content as part of a discussion or submit answers to quizzes/surveys and have all interactions displayed/analyzed in front of the class. Outside of class, mobile devices allow instant access to all course material anytime anywhere a student may be. Beginning in 2011, we will be piloting Blackboard Mobile Learn and Qualtrics to support in-class and out-of-class mobile-learning. These devices also allow students to stay in touch with other students via University social networks, which is another area we are strengthening. 

A University-supported platform for social networking is crucial part of our e-learning strategy. Globally, e-learning has been moving to a new model of “social-learning” and the University is aggressively moving towards transforming our current e-learning environment into a social-learning environment. For example, the use of social networks will allow arbitrary virtual research/learning communities to be easily established for sharing and collaboration. We envision a rapid increase in the use of social networks for teaching, learning and research, bringing students and faculty as well as external partners closer together. 

CityU has also been a leader in the use of e-portfolios to support learning and student employment. With DEC, the e-portfolio platform can be used to create portfolios to document discovery progress and results as well as to share with other students. For graduate students, they will be using the e-portfolio platform to create research portfolios to highlight their research work, share their research papers, and to seek for jobs. For faculty, we plan to expand our e-portfolio work to include teaching portfolios as well as research portfolios. This will further enable the CityU community to share and learn from each other as well as expand the visibility of their work around the world.

To ensure our students are truly benefiting from our DEC experience and D&I efforts, we plan to provide a platform to assist with the recording of student learning outcomes. Learning matrix and rubrics will be created where students can upload artifacts as evidence of achieving learning outcomes and at which level. These outcomes can be at the course, major, department, college/school, or institutional level. The results can help the departments, faculties and university to measure effectiveness and set targets for improvements. 

With the University’s strategy in promotion globalization and internationalization, we see the prevalent use of technology within DEC and D&I to be crucial. Discovery, innovation and technology go hand-in-hand. Leveraging technology to innovate usually brings transformational changes that can propel an organization to new levels. With DEC and D&I, the University is moving rapidly in fulfilling the vision stated in the University’s new Strategy Plan.