UGFN 1000 In Dialogue with Nature’ is a compulsory general education foundation course for undergraduates which engages students to explore how renowned thinkers investigate and understand Nature. Meanwhile, students also reflect on the humans’ place in Nature. Taught in small group seminars, students are required to read, understand and discuss science-related core texts. Students come from all faculties in CUHK, some of them, especially those who have had little exposure to science, find difficulties in understanding the classic texts on their own. To respond to the needs of the students, we have developed an interactive mobile app DiaNable, which serves as a reading companion and a self-valuation tool to help students understand difficult texts. DiaNable consists of a multitude of related questions with various levels of difficulty, and feedbacks are provided to guide students to understand concepts or ideas in the texts. Students’ feedback from quantitative online survey and qualitative focus group interviews suggests that DiaNable can enhance their understanding as well as clarify misunderstanding of the texts. DiaNable is now available in CUHK Mobile App Store and serves more than 3000 undergraduates every year. The idea of this interactive learning aid could be easily extended to other courses with intensive take-home readings.

Throughout the project, more than eight videos for self-learning Cell Biology have been developed by undergraduate student helpers working together with graduate students in CCDB (Centre for Cell and Developmental Biology). These self-learning movies can be download freely at the CCDB website ( http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/centre/ccdb/) for learning the most up-to-date cell biology knowledge.

These self-learning Cell Biology movies are developed from using real-time movies collected by high-resolution confocal imaging system and transgenic organisms (plant and animal) expressing GFP (green fluorescent protein)-tagged organelle markers, followed by editing to include various features such as animated introduction, detailed explanation of concepts by image / movies collected in research, and narration with subtitles.

Title list of developed self-learning cell biology videos:

1. Model Organisms
2. Pollen Tube
3. Cell Membrane
4. Cell Plate (Cytokinesis)
5. Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP)
6. Protein Detection
7. Cell Culture
8. Making Transgenic Animal Cell

Sites for freely download
http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/centre/ccdb/tdg/downloads.html

This project is concerned with adding more content to the animated/interactive map developed in association with ITSC in the previous year. The map itself is an interactive learning platform for the sometimes difficult conceptual material covered in the compulsory first-year course ENGE1640 “Introduction to World Literatures in English.” The nature of the subject matter means that students are asked to explore literature from around the world. This can be particularly disorientating to those with limited exposure to the world beyond Hong Kong. In order to counter such disorientation, the map helps to develop the student’s contextual (geographic and cultural) knowledge of the various literatures under discussion by way of short narrated videos. Phase II of development allows for more content to be added to the map. This means that the animated/interactive world map will feature an additional 15 territories to the five already accessible by the student cohort.

Upgrading and integrating IDEAL for formative assessments and Life Long Learning Skills teaching in paediatrics

E Anthony S Nelson¹, H Simon HS Lam¹, Alex Yung2, Jin Yan², Jenny Fang3, Churk Chan³, WC Stella Chow⁴, Anisha Abraham⁴, Shekhar Kumta<sup>2

1</sup>Department of Paediatrics, ²Teaching and Learning Resource Centre, ³Medical Information Technology, ⁴The Jockey Club School of Public Health and Primary Care, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, PR China

The Department of Paediatrics uses IDEAL for both student formative and summative assessments. Students with mentor support develop MCQs as part of teaching that aims to develop their life long learning skills (LLSK). An analysis of this teaching activity (2008/9 data) suggested that this programme has important benefits for both student learning and the overall teaching programme. The current version of IDEAL has technical limitations related to its use with current operating systems. The Department is moving towards a “flipped class room” approach for student lectures, some of which have been converted to articulate format and uploaded to Blackboard for student access. Despite inclusion of embedded quizzes and assessments, these articulates have not been well received by students and access of the material by students prior to teacher contact has been suboptimal. Better integration of all paediatric e-learning activities would enable better monitoring of student participation in these activities (LLSK, IDEAL and articulate lectures). Upgrading IDEAL is in progress and a single portal for students to access paediatric e-learning programmes has been developed. This portal provides one-stop access to formative assessments, articulate lectures, an online curriculum developed for patient education and the main Medical Curriculum website.

Histology is the study of organs and tissues at cellular level, which is a fundamental knowledge that medical and allied health students must acquire as part of their health professional training. It is essential and clinically relevant for understanding development of pathology and diseases in medicine, for example, pharmacy students can understand the pharmaceutical mechanism of how the drug interfere the metabolism of the cells, or the pathologist can diagnosis of the different stages of cancers and interpret clearly how cells misbehaves. However, undergraduates always find studying histology difficult to learn effectively. Unlike studying body systems in three- dimensional, stained histological sections are only studied either through cross or longitudinal sections along one plane that increase the learning difficulties. Students also need to have a concept how various organs are organized in their mindset during the examination of the histological specimens. Histology lectures and practical are often delivered hastily that students have insufficient time to digest the teaching materials timely. Recently, conventional microscope is no longer used and digital virtual images are presented as substitutes, yet the didactic teaching format has not been changed.

In this project, we developed a novel mobile application named Hi-Med App, serving as a pilot study in learning histology support the blended learning in the Faculty of Medicine. The Hi-Med App comprised of e-content, 2D and 3D animation series, clinical significance topics, and study quizzes. Moreover, the Hi-Med App is readily accessible to the students through iPad that it allows students to access learning content anytime and anywhere. With animation integration, it provides better visualization learning environment to stimulate and enhance students in understanding of histology. More importantly, it allows students to evaluate their understanding of topics through the APP. From the evaluation, majority students and teachers agreed that the Hi-Med App could improve the learning effectiveness and teaching quality of Histology and would like expand its use in broader topics.

Jointly developed by the English Language Teaching Unit and the Information Technology Services Centre, iVocab is a mobile application that supports independent vocabulary learning at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. It allows users to progressively build, consolidate, recycle, and test their knowledge of a select list of high-frequency English words with their mobile devices. On top of the key aspects of vocabulary learning, which include written production, knowledge of related words, knowledge of collocation, and awareness of affixes, iVocab provides corpus-sourced audio input that facilitates aural reception as well as oral production of lexical items. With the incorporation of mobile technology, users can constantly obtain formative feedback on their learning progress through portable devices.

Meridian (Jingluo) is an unique concept in Traditional Chinese Medicine that describes the channel network for the distribution and movement of qi and blood and connection among various parts of the body. The meridians are often expressed in terms of conceptual lines that contain acupoints (Shuxue), the important sites on the superfical part of the body where needling and massage are applied. While the students of TCM are required to understand these details on the body surface, the classical meridian knowledge are described in text and plain drawings in the TCM textbooks, or physical models such as plastic dolls that are inconvenient to bring along with.

Augmented reality (AR) is a type of computer vision that uses camera technology to recognize real world images, objects, and environments and superimposes virtual information and data onto reality in real time. With the popularity of smartphones, it is possible that 3D models could be projected and manipulated by showing the handheld device on particular images. It is previously demonstrated that AR technique could be helpful in projecting digital graphics (Ho et al. 2012).

The current project aims at applying this concept and tries to enrich the plain textbook with interactive multimedia contents, and the following content has been put on test: 1. To express the meridian lines with animations; 2. To view the 3D scalp acupuncture model.

Meridian Illustrator is still in progress. A test version is available here http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/scm/cdg/mi/demo

The current project is funded by the ITSC Courseware development grant (2013-14).

This e-learning tool features an advanced three-dimensional (3D) lung model that can be manipulated virtually in space using simple gestures – a flip of the finger or even a wave of the hand. This technology is called Leap Motion. The student users will undergo a remarkable experience during which they will feel as if they are holding the lung model in 3D space; they will also be able to choose to view the model from different angles of orientation before proceeding with the physiology of the lung, and focusing on the concepts of pressure changes during breathing movements. No 3D lung model combined with Leap Motion features has been developed elsewhere. Our 3D lung model is the first Leap Motion-based model to be introduced into academia.