The global crisis of COVID-19 has severely impacted the entire higher education sector (Marinoni et al., 2020) and spurred timely, innovative, and radical responses from educational institutions across the sector and the world. The focus of much of this attention has been on flagship universities (University World News, 2020). However, the impact of COVID-19 has been even more severe on other institutional types, such as community colleges. About two-thirds of the 20,000 universities worldwide reported that online classes had substituted face to face teaching while the altered practices of teaching and learning through digital means call for new pedagogies, access to the Internet, digital devices and technical infrastructure, as well as digital literacies of instructors and students from diverse backgrounds (Marinoni et al., 2020). This study focuses on an exploration of the effects and implications of COVID-19 on the case study of Hong Kong community colleges. The higher education that community colleges deliver traditionally depends on the concept of dynamic learning community, featuring liberal teacher-student interactions and pedagogic environment, learner-centred formative assessment, effective student services for strategic university articulation, and dynamic student activities and engagement (Tang and Dang, 2019). In the case of Hong Kong, a small community college campus in Hong Kong that serves as a hub of geographic location where the above-mentioned activities take place in real time. In late 2019, it was unprecedented that COVID-19 made Hong Kong’s community colleges close their campus and moved teaching, learning and assessment completely online. This study engages in the case study of Hong Kong’s community colleges in view of how it mitigated COVID-19 through organisational adaptation and sustained the delivery of higher education, especially when global pandemic may persist in upcoming times. Copyright © 2020 CHER-Hong Kong.

Despite the identified high effect size (d=.73) of feedback in affecting student achievement (Hattie & Timperley, 2007), recent feedback research has also found a wide range of factors pertaining to individuals’ feedback perceptions affect their feedback uptake and the effectiveness of feedback in learning (Van derKleij & Lipnevich, 2020). Among these factors, researchers have pointed out negative emotions induced by feedback may hinder feedback use if students do not have adaptive/optimal emotion regulation strategy (Gross, 2008). Based on the ecological feedback model that explicitly includes emotions in examining the complex process of feedback giving, receiving and using (Yang et al., 2014), this qualitative study aimed to explore: 1) what negative emotions university students may have upon receiving feedback, and 2) how students’ feedback orientation (i.e., perceived usefulness of feedback, self-efficacy, social awareness, and responsibility for using feedback to promote academic performance and achievement) relates to emotion regulation in the feedback context. In the COVID-19 pandemic period, individual-based interview (40 to 50 minutes) was conducted respectively through Zoom to seven university students at four different academic years in a Hong Kong university. Content and theme analyses revealed feedback orientation per se plays an influential and positive role in helping students regulate their negative emotions evoked by feedback. Specific roles of the four dimensions of FO also varied in these students’ emotion regulation. Implications of this qualitative study to both feedback and emotion regulation fields are discussed. Copyright © 2020 CHER-Hong Kong.

This presentation reports the initial findings of a study that examines university governance in relation to the institutional and cultural settings of the higher education systems of three Chinese societies – Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. The research employs a mixed-method strategy that consists of semi-structured interviews and a small-scale survey. The qualitative part of the research sought to explain the coordination mechanism in university governance through an analysis of data generated from 57 interviews. Evidences collected from the interviews revealed the interactions and relationships amongst the various actors on governance matters, and constructed a taxonomy of institutional balance of power in the higher education systems of the three Chinese societies. The qualitative research also generated 12 situations of governance matters in relation to cultural hybridity, informed by corresponding theoretical components. The small-scale survey, in which 261 manager-academics from the three societies rated the 12 scenarios of cultural hybridity in terms of their realism and acceptableness, then captured cultural differences in handling governance matters in the three higher education systems. This quantitative research reveals that Macau has greater acceptance of these cultural scenarios in comparison with Hong Kong and Taiwan. However, the figures show that most of these cultural situations are generally considered unacceptable, though their likelihood varies in the three places. These findings offers insights into the relationships between institutional forms and cultural features of higher education governance in the three societies. Copyright © 2020 CHER-Hong Kong.

BACKGROUND: In recent years, there has been considerable interest in taking up the opportunities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education. As an emerging concept and a driving technological force, AI is changing the kind of knowledge and skills students need for success in the forthcoming Industrial Revolution 4.0, and at the same time, enabling novel, powerful methods of teaching and learning. Although many school leaders, policy-makers and frontline teachers understand the need for embracing AI, they may lack clarity on what to teach students in the era of AI; how to harness the power of AI tools; and where to start given their own school contexts. This paper describes an ongoing study that uses Communities of Practice (CoPs) as a knowledge management strategy to support Hong Kong K-12 schools in embracing AI. CoPs comprise members who genuinely care about a mutual interest and seek to solve a common problem. The premise underlying this study is that the cultivation of CoPs may present enabling conditions and pave the way for AI adoptions. In these CoPs, members would engage in reflective discussions on the opportunities and challenges of embracing AI in their schools and collaboratively support each other through meaningful knowledge exchange. METHODS: A collective case study is being conducted with members from 20 K-12 schools in Hong Kong to substantiate and illustrate the power of CoPs that aim to support schools in embracing AI. Qualitative data are gathered via semi-structured interviews and focus-group meetings with participants. Thematic analysis is adopted for analysing the data. RESULTS: The preliminary results of this ongoing study have shown that CoPs, if successfully launched, can play an uplifting role for Hong Kong K-12 schools embracing AI. More specifically, the collaborative learning process in CoPs has helped members make sense of AI core concepts and the pedagogical implications as they access authentic, relevant and updated information. The

BACKGROUND: Research on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIEd) has become increasingly active during the past 20 years, with great interest, rich literature, and huge diversity. The diversity in research topics and technologies keeps increasing along with the tremendous growth in the application scope of AIEd research. A comprehensive overview of this field is necessary to understand what had been concerned in AIEd research, what is going on in the field of AIEd, and what might be the future of AIEd research. METHODS: This paper combined the structural topic modeling (STM) with the bibliometric analysis to automatically identify prominent research topics from the large-scale AIEd literature in the past two decades. Specifically, by using STM, we uncovered important research topics concerned within the AIEd community. The evolution of these topics was explored by using a nonparametric Mann-Kendall (MK) trend test. In addition, the correlation between these topics was further explored and visualized based on a semi-parametric Gaussian procedure. RESULTS: The annual trend of publications concerning AIEd had grown consistently across the past 20 years, indicating that research on AIEd had received a growing interest from academia Analyses on topical trends, correlations, and clusters reveal distinct developmental trends of these topics and promising research orientations. Specifically, the top six topics having the highest proportions in the dataset were cognition and perception, programming education, prediction, MOOCs, semantic Web and recommender systems, assessment and feedback, and emotion detection. Results of the MK test highlighted five topics receiving an increase in research interest, including prediction, assessment and feedback, flipped classroom and biosignal data, STEM education, and English language learning. In addition, several inter-topic research directions were identified, including 1) flipped classroom and biosignal data, emotion detection, and

The COVID-19 pandemic and social unrest have posed a unique set of challenges to Hong Kong. During these two social events, parents of children with special educational needs (SEN) who were already experiencing caregiving pressure, likely coped with additional stressors; they were at a higher risk of mental health problems. A pre-registered, cross-sectional survey study was carried out among 234 Hong Kong parents of children with SEN, investigating the associations of stigmatized identity, perceived discrimination, and subjective well-being under the impact of these social events. Utilizing the Bayesian modelling, we found that highly self-stigmatized parents not only perceived more daily-life discriminating behaviors against them, but also reported having higher distress, more negative emotions, and lower life satisfaction. A higher perceived impact of social events and more discrimination were also associated with lower well-being. Additionally, stigmatized identity, perceived discrimination, and perceived impact of social events demonstrated unique associations with well-being variables, indicating they were substantial stressors. The study called out for public attention to the mental health conditions among parents of children with SEN and other disadvantaged groups in society. Copyright © 2021 by the authors.

The purpose of this study was to explore how instrumental teachers reflect their professional development pathways with reference to their own apprenticeship experiences. The participants were three female instrumental teachers who taught the piano and violin. Reflections of teachers’ own learning experiences on their career pathways and professional development were collected from the participants through interviews, teaching diaries, and field notes. Several themes emerged from the data collected over an approximately six-month period. First, all the participants experienced long musical apprenticeships. Second, the teachers rarely perceived pedagogical skills are ‘learnable’ skills as performing skills. Finally, all the teachers were only interested in practical, examination-oriented professional development programmes, as opposed to academic or pedagogically-oriented outcomes such as journals or conferences. The unitisation of professional development choices would appear to be the most urgent and pressing problem faced by instrumental teachers. Copyright © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

We analyze the policies of China and Israel towards students from Hong Kong and East Jerusalem respectively. We demonstrate that they are treated as International students and subject to a form of ‘internationalization’ designed to consolidate national forms of identity and extend state control over ‘troublesome’ minorities within the nation state. This domestic adaptation of the structures designed to support internationalization within Universities, through which the state deploys higher education as a tool of ‘soft power’ to control parts of the nation, operates within a broader program of ‘internal colonization’ that is neither well developed in the literature nor explained by prominent typologies of internationalization. Copyright © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.