The University’s vision in recent years has been driven by engagement – engagement with people from different communities and cultures, with different disciplines, and with novel ideas, situations and technologies. In 2017–18, this engagement resulted in enormous advances in providing students with a worldclass education that pushes at the boundaries and ploughs new ground, particularly in interdisciplinary learning. The Common Core has been the trailblazer, demonstrating that it is possible to bring teachers together from diverse disciplines to offer joint courses that enrich students’ understanding of the biggest problems facing the world, from climate change to big data to how the arts help articulate the human experience. The programme was formally launched in 2012 and in 2018–19 offered 176 courses. The University is now ready to take this approach to the next stage with full interdisciplinary programmes leading to a Bachelor of Arts and Sciences (BASc) that will nurture globally minded thinkers and leaders and equip them to address the challenges of today’s complex world. Six variants of the BASc were announced in 2018 that involve all 10 faculties and will be offered from September 2019: a broad-based BASc ranging across the arts, sciences and social sciences; BAScs specialising in Applied AI, Design+, FinTech or Global Health and Development; and a two-year BASc in Social Data Science for senior students. Students of the four-year programmes will undertake foundational modules on critical thinking, leadership TEACHING AND LEARNING training and big data, with the latter delivered in collaboration with Microsoft. They will also have the option of securing an international minor at an institution outside Hong Kong, allied with a summer experience. The best and brightest students will be sought for this programme, which will also link students to internship opportunities with organisations such as Google, the World Health Organization and the United Nations. The BAScs are not the only teaching and learning innovation. The Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine rolled out its Enrichment Year in September 2018 in which third-year MBBS students are spending the year in a self-directed programme to prepare them for the demands of the clinical years of study. In this ground-breaking initiative, students can opt to pursue research, undertake an intercalated degree at HKU or a university overseas such as Yale University or Oxford University, study a subject of interest outside medicine, or engage in humanitarian work and service learning (see page 11). The University also continues to expand options for students to have learning experiences both in Mainland China and overseas, with the goal of making these available to every undergraduate by 2022. There are different layers to this commitment. Several dual-degree programmes have been launched with institutions such as Sciences Po in France and the University of California, Berkeley. In autumn 2017 we also announced that students of the HKU-Cambridge Undergraduate Recruitment Scheme (Engineering and Computer Science) can now graduate with three degrees: full Bachelor degrees from each university and a Master of Engineering from Cambridge upon successful completion of five years of study. Exchange programmes are another option for non-local learning. HKU has exchange agreements with 44 countries on every continent and in 2017–18 sent about 1,400 students overseas and 459 to Mainland China and welcomed 1,350 exchange students from these places. More than 80 programmes have been launched with the Mainland, while HKU’s partnership with Common Purpose offers leadership training in Manila and Yangon (with plans to add Shanghai and Bangalore in 2019) and the HKU Summer Institute offers courses and internships in cities such as Shanghai, Tokyo and Paris. The University has also been designated a ‘super partner‘ of the University of Sydney, which is hosting 100 undergraduates from HKU every year. New technology has made it easier for students to continue their learning abroad and has also opened up new possibilities in the classroom. For the Enrichment Year, the medical faculty has developed a social media platform with the Education University of Hong Kong where students share experiences and engage in discussions with their classmates around the world and their faculty-based mentors. The University as a whole has also invested in advancing technology for teaching, in particular video (see page 14), that can be applied in the flipped classroom, massive open online courses (MOOCs), apps for learning and many other ways. Students are benefitting from a new Digital Literacy Laboratory that opened in the Chi Wah Learning Commons in September 2018 where they can develop skills in filming, editing and writing videos for presentation in class. The Common Core is also continuing to evolve and attract interest from outside the University. New Common Core programmes were launched in 2018 that give students opportunities to contribute to research (see page 10). The University Grants Committee has also invited HKU to be a key player in an experiment to share general education and Common Core content across four universities: HKU will deliver seven of the 10 courses, while the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University will deliver one course each. Partnerships are also being forged with institutions outside Hong Kong in connection with the Common Core. HKU has invited other comprehensive universities around the world that offer liberal arts foundation programmes to join GLADE – Global Liberal Arts Design Experiments – which will hold a symposium in 2019. The University also formalised arrangements with three Mainland universities to jointly offer Common Core courses, with one week in Hong Kong and two weeks on the Mainland. The latter initiative, called CLASS (China Liberal Arts Summer Sessions), follows a 2017 pilot course with Peking University and will commence in 2019. CLASS was announced at the C9+1 Symposium hosted by HKU in April 2018. This event brought together senior managers, teachers and students from 10 top research universities – nine from Mainland China plus HKU – to discuss key issues in teaching and learning, such as how technology facilitates internationalisation, cross-faculty innovation and entrepreneurship, e-learning, and building student ownership of interdisciplinary projects. The highprofile event included keynote addresses by China’s Minister of Education Mr Chen Baosheng and Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Mrs Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor. The 10 participating universities agreed at the event to take turns holding an annual summit and to create more opportunities for academic co-operation between their students and teachers. Opportunity on the road to excellence is a firm feature of HKU’s curriculum and a key strategy for keeping the University attractive to new students. Students entering HKU today get opportunities to study abroad and in Mainland China, to learn from other disciplines, to try their hand at research, to engage with the community through experiential and service learning and, most importantly, to develop leadership abilities – all in addition to their rigorous academic studies. These opportunities have proven attractive to top-performing students from Hong Kong and abroad, who in 2018 continued to make HKU their top choice. Working on robot parts in the DreamLab. The Faculty of Engineering developed the lab as an innovative space where design concepts can be developed in an interdisciplinary or inter-faculty environment and prototypes made using state-of-the-art equipment. ︱9 8︱ Students from nine Chinese universities and HKU gathered for the C9+1 Symposium to promote academic cooperation.
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