Project Summary

This cross-institutional project aims to enhance and support the development of SL as an effective pedagogical strategy at the participating UGC-funded institutions and beyond through a multi-faceted approach.

• Developed and offered an e-Learning module for SL teachers and practitioners on teaching concepts, pedagogical knowledge and skills of SL,
• Orgainsed teacher development courses in four consecutive years to offer teaching training to 92 participants from various local and offshore institutions who are interested in developing and teaching SL courses at higher education institutions.
• Developed an SL e-resource platform comprising
  • an e-Learning module for students that enrolled 7,345 students from the participating institutions;
  • a bank of tools for teachers to assess the impacts of SL on students and the Community; and
  • a database of 16 bilingual exemplars of good practice that focuses on various themes in SL, and are documented online for reference.
• Piloted and implemented 4 collaborative SL subjects and projects that facilitates peer learning and collaboration between colleagues in the participating institutions;
• Supported 12 action research projects with grants to promote an evidence-based, critically reflective approach to teaching SL;
• Built up a CoP on SL with a membership of 340 SL academic and practitioners to promote sharing of experience in the UGC-funded institutions and beyond, and organised symposia for staff and students respectively, details of the events organised are shown as follows:
  • 33 workshops/seminars were organised and attended by 1,963 from UGC-funded institutions and beyond.
  • 83 participants from 8 local tertiary institutions participated in the staff symposium
  • 34 students from 9 local institutions attended in the student symposium
  • participants had positive views about the workshops/seminars and symposia
• Conducted a qualitative study on teachers’ practices of assessing students in SL and an exploratory study to identify SL teachers’ perceptions of the challenges towards assessing an SL subject with scholarly outputs;
• Carried out a systematic compilation and review of literature about service-learning in Hong Kong;
• Generated and disseminated quite a number of scholarly outputs from the project; and
• To publish a book entitled “Service-Learning Capacity Enhancement in Hong Kong Higher Education” (publisher: Springer).

Throughout the entire project period, the whole project team had worked together to enhance the capacity of the participating institutions and beyond in developing and implementing academically rigorous, highly rewarding SL subjects and projects, to promote sharing of experience as well as encouraging conducting research in SL with close collaboration.