A two-day education symposium, entitled e-Learning Forum Asia 2009 and organised by the Education Development Office of City University of Hong Kong (CityU), started today (11 May) to promote electronic teaching and learning in tertiary institutions across Asia. Scholars and distinguished guests from the US, Australia, UK, Taiwan, Singapore, mainland China and Hong Kong will exchange views and ideas on the subject at the forum. CityU is showcasing various innovative online solutions for enhancing the effects of e-learning.

This year’s forum is focused on topics related to Asia’s tertiary education, including the infrastructure of information technology, multi-lingual issues, social and mobile learning, and factors affecting institutional deployment of e-Learning.

Officiating at the opening ceremony were Dr Yang Zhijian, Deputy Director-General from the Department of Higher Education, the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China; Dr Chan Ka-ki, Deputy Secretary for Education from the Education Bureau of Hong Kong SAR Government; and Professor Way Kuo, CityU President.

Dr Yang said, “Thanks to the Internet, education has become available everywhere, going beyond the conventional university compounds into the community at large. More people now have access to tertiary education and can share the high-quality teaching resources.”

Dr Yang then briefed the audience on the development of e-learning in mainland China. He said that distance learning courses at tertiary level started on the mainland in late 1990s, and as of 2008, over 4 million people had completed their higher education through such programmes. In order to widen the sharing of quality teaching resources, a series of free online courses have been developed for tertiary institutions nation-wide. More than 800 of them are now available on the Internet.

“Information literacy becomes increasingly important in order that our students learn effectively,” said Dr Chan. “Students nowadays are expected to be both competent and enjoyable in engaging a wide range of learning activities that involve electronic means and tools,” Dr Chan added. “The existing ‘IT in Education Strategy’ launched by the Education Bureau in 1998 has progressed from building the infrastructure then to using IT in everyday teaching activities now. Using the right technology at the right time for appropriate learning tasks is crucial in yielding quality student learning and is indeed the emphasis of the strategy.”

“E-learning creates a lot of new opportunities for teaching and learning,” said Professor Kuo. “It goes beyond political, physical and economical boundaries and makes information available internationally,” he added. “CityU advocates e-learning, which got started on campus four years ago. It is an honour and privilege for CityU to host such an event today.”

As an early pioneer in e-learning in Asia, CityU organised the first Asia e-Learning Forum in 2006. The initiative received strong support from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University and Taiwan’s Feng Chia University, and since then, the three universities have taken turns in hosting the annual event.

Dr Jerry Yu Jer-tsang, CityU’s Chief Information Officer and chairman of the forum’s organising committee, indicated that information technology is crucial to education institutes in the 21st century for enhancing education, research and administrative services. He said, “Supporting students’ learning with information technology forms an important part of CityU’s strategic plan. In view of the upcoming new four-year normative curriculum and the increasing demand for continuous education, the university will continue to allocate resources for e-learning to help students further improve their learning.”

Electronic learning has indeed become part of students’ learning experience at CityU, as 70% of its academic programmes use e-learning platforms and the log-in count reaches as high as more than six million per academic year. The University’s e-learning platform provides students with rich learning resources for various programmes, academic courses and complementary courses, encouraging them to pursue proactive learning. Also, teachers can use e-learning platforms to make various assessments and respond to students’ feedback and questions efficiently. Throughout the study process, e-learning platforms can help students immensely.

CityU launched its unified e-learning platform at 2005, aiming to facilitate teaching and learning as well as online data exchanges between teachers and students and to create a student-oriented learning environment with the aid of technologies. In its early stage, the system focused on making course contents more interactive and interesting. With better understanding of the platform operation and new tools and functions added to the platform, academic colleagues can now interact with students through e-forums and blogs.

For media enquiries, please contact Ms Zoey Tsang (phone: 9550 1503 / 2788 9411) of the Communications and Public Relations Office of City University of Hong Kong.