Common Core Kudos

The interdisciplinary, integrated education pioneered through the Common Core was extended to other universities in Hong Kong and Mainland China in 2018–19 and has earned honours for its achievements.

Transdisciplinary Team Honoured

HKU’s Common Core team won the prestigious UGC [University Grants Committee] Teaching Award (Team) in 2019 in recognition of their success at breaking down boundaries and exposing students to new and challenging learning experiences.

The Common Core@HKU: Transdisciplinarity-in-Action Team, as it is formally called, includes Professor Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, the Director of the Common Core, as well as Dr Hu Xiao from the Faculty of Education, Professor Gina Marchetti from the Faculty of Arts, Mr Mathew Pryor from the Faculty of Architecture and Dr Julian Tanner from the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine.

Their achievements include creating multiple learning formats through the Common Core, such as flipped classrooms, summer school courses, experiential learning classes and Common Core Global Experiences; establishing partnerships with community organisations in Hong Kong; and launching GLADE, the Global Liberal Arts Design Experiments, to collaborate with partner research-intensive universities around the world to deepen integrative learning for undergraduates. They also launched the Transdisciplinary Team Project in which small groups of students from different disciplines take on a joint research project, exemplified by Dr Tanner’s initial course on research and community awareness around hepatitis C.

“We prefer to say ‘trans-’ rather than interdisciplinary because we don’t want to presume pre-established disciplines that are merely complementing one another,” Professor Kochhar-Lindgren said. “Transdisciplinarity enhances our capacity to pose new questions, invent research methods across disciplines, and learn together how to better co-create scalable responses in the context of our most difficult and fascinating challenges.” The team will next focus on developing undergraduate research projects related to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals of gender equality, sustainable cities and communities, and good health and well-being that will involve students both from HKU and from partner UGC-funded universities.

CLASS Experiments

The Common Core crossed borders in 2019 with a pilot programme offering courses with partner institutions in Mainland China.

The China Liberal Arts Summer Sessions (CLASS) offered five credit-bearing courses over an intensive three weeks, with students spending two of the weeks at either Nanjing University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University or Zhejiang University with Mainland students, then one week at HKU. The courses covered scientific revolutions, gender and health, Hong Kong cinema, globalisation and architecture, and the development and social implications of stem cells.

Professor Sham Mai-har of the School of Biomedical Sciences taught the stem cell course and welcomed the built-in exchange component. “The Hong Kong students loved our course because we were able to spend a lot of time with them. The Zhejiang University students loved us even more! Their normal teaching modes are quite conventional and use traditional didactic methods and they had not experienced our open approach to teaching and learning before. The teachers there who sat in our course were also impressed with this,” she said.

Sharing Our Resources

A programme to share Common Core and General Education courses across four institutions had a successful pilot run in 2018–19.

The programme, funded with $15 million from the University Grants Committee, involved HKU, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who each offered at least one course open to all students from the four institutions. Of the first 10 courses on offer, seven were HKU Common Core courses. Course times and delivery formats were adapted so students from other campuses could more easily attend, such as using online learning and flipped classrooms.