Environmental Health and Toxicology

Teacher: Dr. YUE Patrick Ying Kit

Department: Department of Biology, HKBU

The course BIOL3016 Environmental Health and Toxicology employed the platform of Future Learn for inter-cultural and cross-discipline exchanges of students. Students needed to complete the learning and teaching activities in the Future Learn, such as watching videos, online quizzes and discussion forums. In addition, HKBU students needed to exchange ideas with students from the University of Macau and the Macau University of Science and Technology.

The evaluation of the course was conducted via the students' completion rate of the learning and teaching activities in the Future Learn, the number of posts per student in the online discussion forums and scores of the online quizzes. Also, students' performance in the examination paper and feedback from Course Feedback Questionnaire (CFQ) were adopted. In general, the students' responses were positive. However, there is only limited qualitative feedback from students partly because students who majored in science tended not to provide their detailed opinions.

Dr Yue mentioned that the participation of the students in the learning and teaching activities in Future Learn was not as high as expected. Close monitoring of student's progress and feedback from interaction partners are used to check students' learning. Another challenge confronted by Dr Yue was the class time between HKBU and partner universities, limiting the synchronous interaction among students.

When inquiring if he would continue to re-run the course with intercultural and cross-discipline exchanges, Dr Yue indicated that he had already expand similar attempt in another course. He also hoped to re-run the course with the revised course content based on the experiences acquired from this year. Ideally, Dr Yue would like to have financial support for manpower to revise the course content and assist students' learning.

Last but not least, this course also possessed the Service-Learning (SL) compenent in collaboration with secondary schools. Albeit originally designed through face-to-face mode, all activities / demonstration of experiments / presentation delivered by students were recorded in videos and shared online via Zoom. This was another feature of this course, though not the primary one.