The Uptake of Technology-Supported Learning and Teaching Practices across Disciplines as a Result of Teachers’ Professional Development Roy Kam, Educational Development Centre,Lydia Lee, Hong Kong Community College, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China Overview: This is a reflection on the uptake of technology-supported learning and teaching practices through a range of teachers’ professional development offered by a centre in the Hong Kong tertiary institution. Stream: Teacher Training and Development

Hong Kong Polytechnic has about 19,000 FTE students and 1600 lecturers. The Education Development Centre is responsible for staff support. There had been a new philosophy that blending learning needed to be integrated into all programmes but there were no completely on line courses. Most of the subjects taught here are content intensive and learning is usually through a second language as all classes are in English except Chinese. Very few courses have elective modules.

The EDC therefore had to develop both face to face and on line blended professional development for lecturers. They use a lot of short “bite” size bits of information as one page guides and 2 -3 minute videos.

Three cases studies were outlined to show how they had engaged lecturers:

• Hotel and Tourism Management wanted to use group projects with full time students but wanted to see hoe and what each student had contributed. They used a Wiki and this worked well and enabled students to collaborate as well as identify when they did not agree.
• Mental Health nursing again a group project but they wanted more peer learning and so they used a discussion board and students had to provide feedback and prompts for each other
• English for media they wanted collaboration but also on several areas so they chose a blog and set it up as a newspaper

These all worked well and slowly others are beginning to use more technology more willing in humanities and arts than science.

Next step will be to include this in the marks for assessment.