Professor Nancy Law and her team win the Faculty Knowledge Exchange (KE) Award 2021

We are pleased to announce that Professor Nancy Law from the Faculty’s Academic Unit of Teacher Education and Learning Leadership (TELL) and her team* has won the Faculty KE Award 2021.

The winning entry is entitled “Co-creating a New Normal of Empowered Learning through Digital Citizenship Research”. In April 2020, the Learning and Assessment for Digital Citizenship research team led by Professor Law released survey findings that revealed huge diversities in digital literacy achievement among primary and secondary students within and across schools, with serious implications on students’ learning and wellbeing as well as associated equity issues. Wide support was received from the education sector, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and charitable organisations to launch an action-focused comprehensive 360-degree survey study called “eCitizen Education 360” (e360). It aims to provide evidence about the impact of school suspension to guide community-wide actions in co-creating a New Normal to combat the negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic by supporting the learning and wellbeing of students, families, schools and teachers.

Under the e360 project, a total of five press conferences were held to release the survey findings and recommendations. This has encouraged charitable organisations to help underprivileged families to cope with the e-learning stress; NGOs to structure their services to provide the needed skills and resources to different stakeholder groups. Principals and teachers from primary and secondary schools who had high e-learning preparedness also shared their insights and experience on adopting and interpreting the recommendations from the e360 findings. Furthermore, territory-wide seminars were organised for the dissemination and intellectual explorations of research related to digital citizenship.

The Faculty KE Awards were introduced in 2011 to recognise each Faculty’s outstanding KE accomplishment that has made demonstrable economic, social or cultural impacts to benefit the community, business/industry, or partner organisations. The selection criteria include evidence of the KE project’s link with excellence in research or in teaching and learning at HKU; evidence of an effective engagement process with the non-academic sector(s); and evidence of demonstrable benefits to the community, business/industry, or partner organisations.

Our hearty congratulations to Professor Law and her team for their achievements in KE!

*The team members are:

Professor Catherine Chan, Professor, Academic Unit of Social Contexts and Policies of Education (SCAPE)
Professor Jimmy de la Torre, Professor, Academic Unit of Human Communication, Development and Information Sciences (CDIS)
Mr Patrick Lam, Senior Research Assistant, Digital Citizenship Project Team
Dr Min Lan, Post-doctoral Fellow, TELL
Miss Liang Qianru, Postgraduate student, Digital Citizenship Project Team
Dr Elizabeth Loh, Assistant Professor, TELL
Dr Pan Qianqian, Post-doctoral Fellow, CDIS
Professor Nirmala Rao, Serena H.C. Yang Professor in Early Childhood Development and Education, CDIS
Dr Frank Reichert, Assistant Professor, SCAPE
Dr Tan Cheng Yong, Associate Professor, SCAPE
Dr Gary Wong, Assistant Professor, CDIS
Mr Zhang Yuxiao, Research Assistant, Digital Citizenship Project Team