The Review 2013

An entire year has passed by rather uneventfully, with no major hiccups in the second year of our four-year curriculum and Centennial Campus. Everything went as planned, seemingly with ease. However, I liken the year's activities to a swan gliding gracefully across a still lake: in reality, the swan is paddling furiously under the lake's surface. The smooth sailing of the University in the past year is entirely due to the no-less-than-vigorous efforts afforded by my steadfast and dedicated colleagues behind the scenes. It is therefore my distinct honour to have the privilege to provide a brief introduction to their work in this Review for 2012-13. A Successful First Year for the New Curriculum The first case in point is the new curriculum. Our colleagues have been preparing for this change since 2004 - as soon as the government announced secondary-school education would reduce from seven to six years and undergraduate education would increase to four years, a trend congruent with other parts of the world. At HKU we saw this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and began working immediately to re-articulate our education aims and re-imagine our curriculum. The result has been an emphasis on the total learning experience that brings learning to all areas of campus life. Experiential learning opportunities have been expanded, a Common Core of courses has been introduced to engage students in questions of importance to the world beyond their chosen discipline, and an extensive academic advising and support system has been put in place in all faculties and residential halls and colleges. We began trialling various components of the new curriculum four years ago, which made HKU exceptionally well prepared when the first full year of the curriculum began in September 2012. The broad consensus showed that this was a very successful year. Students reported positively on the new curriculum in surveys and written comments. Both the three-year and four-year cohorts performed similarly well. The faculties also brought back positive reports on various fronts about this ground- breaking year. Having said that, there are challenges ahead. As the two cohorts advance down separate paths in their education, their learning will increasingly diverge. Teachers will have to work extra hard to keep both groups on track. As a University, we will need to continue monitoring and adjusting to ensure the new curriculum fulfils our teaching and learning goals. The paddling beneath the surface will not let up. If anything, we will need even greater leg power to sustain the promising start to the four-year curriculum. Excellence in Research In comparison, our research programme had a fairly straightforward year -which is to say, we continued to achieve excellence in our output, to fortify our support to researchers and to help them identify new funding and collaboration opportunities. It is certainly no small feat for HKU to be awarded the largest share in the University Grants Council's annual General Research Fund bidding exercise for 11 years in a row. The secret to our success is clearly due to our hardworking and brilliant academics. HKU has just over 1,000 professoriate staff, and 125 of them are ranked among the top one per cent in their field by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI). This is an amazing ratio, especially when you consider a sizeable percentage of our academic staff is in arts, humanities and other fields which are not included in the ISI ranking. We have a world-class team of scholars and in recent years we have been focusing on building a sustainable research culture by recruiting young, up- and-coming academics who have potential to expand and excel in new horizons. As with teaching, an enormous amount of effort is behind our successes and we are clearly heading in the right direction. The University successfully THE REVIEW 2013 ⎜ The Vice-Chancellor's Message The University Never Stops The University of Hong Kong ⎜ 3