Professor Joshua Mok Ka Ho
Vice-President
Lam Man Tsan Chair Professor of Comparative Policy
Lingnan University
In recent decades, higher education institutions around the globe have been under pressure for performance evaluations. One major performance review is closely related to graduate employment, and higher education management is under intensified pressure for preparing their graduates for the highly competitive labour markets. Meanwhile, higher education institutions have confronted with the growing pressure for global rankings, which have adversely affected student learning when academics are chasing rankings and citations without caring student learning. This keynote presentation critically reflects upon the role of higher education against the context of the growing influences of neo-liberalism and geo-politics on higher education management. The importance of higher education is not only for job preparation for university graduates but nurturing young generation with cross-cultural understanding, empowering them to become caring citizens who are adaptive to the uncertain future. This keynote presentation will share Lingnan University experiences with highlights of the importance of comparative and international perspectives for student learning.
Professor Joshua Mok Ka Ho is the Vice-President and concurrently Lam Man Tsan Chair Professor of Comparative Policy of Lingnan University. Professor Mok is no narrow disciplinary specialist but has worked creatively across the academic worlds of sociology, political science, and public and social policy while building up his wide knowledge of China and the region. In addition, Professor Mok has published extensively in the fields of comparative education policy, comparative development and policy studies, and social development in contemporary China and East Asia. In particular, he has contributed to the field of social change and education policy in a variety of ways, not the least of which has been his leadership and entrepreneurial approach to the organisation of the field.
Professor Ricky KWOK Yu-kwong
Vice President (Research and Student Development)
Chair Professor of Computer Engineering
Hong Kong Metropolitan University
Generation and dissemination of knowledge are two major contributions of a university. Scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) is precisely about the nexus between these two contributions. Specifically, an enthusiastic teacher (read: someone who is willing to go the extra mile to design and implement innovative pedagogies so as to enable more effective learning) should be encouraged and supported to publish his/her insights and experiences in teaching. Indeed, from a SoTL perspective, teaching becomes sort of like a “makerspace,” providing loads of opportunities to generate new knowledge about how to better disseminate knowledge. The impact of such research results should not be underestimated.
In this talk, the speaker will share his thinking about SoTL and also advocate wider participation in this genre of research. He will also discuss institutional measures to support colleagues in pursuing SoTL.
Ricky joined the University (then OUHK) in February 2021 as the Vice President (Students and Support). He was the Associate Vice-President (Teaching and Learning) at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) for a five-year term from January 2015 to December 2019, spearheading various mission-critical institutional e-learning endeavors (e.g., MOOCs, flipped-classroom learning, innovative pedagogies and platforms, learning analytic research, etc.) via a university-central office called Technology-Enriched Learning Initiative (TELI) which he founded in 2015. He also served as an Associate Dean of Engineering and the Deputy Head of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at HKU. Prior to that, he was a full-time staff member at Colorado State University (Fort Collins, Colorado, USA), University of Southern California (Los Angeles, California, USA), and Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana, USA).
