This article compares and discusses three prevailing approaches used to understand the concept of school culture and school culture phenomena. The approaches are typology-functionalist approach, process approach, and improvement-effectiveness approach. Compared with the other two, improvement-effectiveness approach is identified as more appropriate to conceptualize school culture when the concept is applied to promote school improvement and effectiveness. Moreover, the School Improvement Model of School Culture developed by Cavanagh and Dellar is introduced with the implications of the model to Hong Kong school leaders, policy-makers and educational researchers are being discussed. Copyright © 2009 Hong Kong Teachers’ Centre.

Course management system (CMS) is expected to be a part of major system developments in educational intitutions as the information technology continues to emerge into all levels of education. Particularly, this trend has also been expanded to all post-secondary institutions. Indeed, the adoption of packaged commercial CMS (e.g. WebCT and Blackboard) is a common practice in most institutions, yet it is often lack of flexibility to satisfy the special needs in the institutions, especially in our community college. In addition to the issue of system design, a long-term financial commitment and the high cost of system maintenance are expected, which stands as the stumbling block in the college development To solve our challenges, we have adopted the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) [1] that offers an open and community source framework. In this paper, we propose a practical implementation method based on our design experience on our newly developed CMS using the Sakai project platform. Our approach is a cost effective solution with minimum resources usage such as the size of the development team, project time frame, and hardware requirements. In addition, technical backgrounds including the system architecture, software installation, tools development and system enhancements will be introduced and explained in details. We believe our experience in CMS development and research findings can make a significant contribution to the post-secondary institutions, especially in Hong Kong. Copyright © 2010 IEEE.

As computing technology continues to emerge into all levels of education, a course management system (CMS) is expected to be part of the primary system developments, which offers an enormous impact, particularly in today's post-secondary institutions. The adoption of packaged commercial CMS (e.g. WebCT and Blackboard) is a common practice in most educational institutions, yet it often lacks the flexibility to satisfy special needs of the institutions. This is especially true of our community college. In addition to the issue of system design, a long-term financial commitment and the high cost of system maintenance stand as stumbling blocks in the college's development of a CMS. To solve these challenges, we have adopted the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) [1], a CMS that offers an open and community source framework. In preparation to the system design and development, a needs assessment has been conducted to investigate the project feasibility and functional requirements, which serve as the keystone to our system implementation. In this paper, we articulate the motivations, feasibility study results, functional requirements, as well as the highlights of our current progress, future implementation and evaluation. We believe our experience in CMS development and research findings can make a significant contribution to post-secondary institutions, especially in Hong Kong. Copyright © 2010 ACM.

Self-regulated learning (SRL) relates to self-generated thoughts, feelings, and behaviours that continuously amend and improve performance, aiming to accomplish self-set goals and the ability of people’s willingness to concentrate, adjust, evaluate, and manage their own behaviour. Studies strongly suggest that students’ academic success can be better achieved when the design of e-learning environments involves the consideration of SRL development. In recent years, e-portfolios are used widely and globally in higher education and have become one of the major active learning processes in self-learning online platforms that support students’ self-reflection, learning motivation, self-efficacy, and so on. There is a significant need for more studies on the full range of factors of SRL for higher education students in e-portfolios projects, including but not limited to understanding the influences, all possible factors, technical support, and students’ learning process and/or learning outcomes related to SRL.This research study aims to collect information directly from higher education students with actual practice in and experience of e-portfolios for two consecutive semesters. The quantitative data have been collected within the Pintrich’s (2004) social–cognitive perspective of the SRL framework and used the developed self-regulation of learning self-report scale (SRL-SRS), covering the six core factors of SRL: planning, self-monitoring, evaluation, reflection, effort, and self-efficacy. The same self-report paper questionnaire was distributed to 262 undergraduate year-1 students in semester 1 and semester 2. After data filtering, pretest and posttest data obtained from 134 valid questionnaires were used for analysis. The measuring result from the Rasch model has been analysed using SPSS 21, findings included a paired sample t test and the one-within-one-between subject analysis of variance (ANOVA).On the other hand, the qualitative research positively helps collect further

Studies have shown that the School Kindness Scale (SKS) has adequate psychometric properties in different societies such as Canada, Turkey, and the Philippines. However, there is scarce evidence on the psychometric validity of this scale across multiple societies and educational contexts. This study explores the cross-national invariance of the SKS among high school students in the Philippines, Hong Kong, and mainland China. Results showed that the modified unidimensional model of school kindness with correlated error terms on item number 2 and 3 had the most optimal fit. There was evidence supporting partial invariance of the modified unidimensional model of school kindness across setting and year level, and full invariance across gender. Whereas school kindness also demonstrated positive correlations with perceived academic performance in Hong Kong and mainland China, this construct was linked to higher emotional and social engagement in math in all contexts. Copyright © 2022 Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Critical (multimodal) discourse studies of marketing or corporate documents of universities have shown the rapid neoliberalization of higher education and academia around the world. However, little attention has been paid to promotional materials for academic events. This chapter examines posters advertising invited lectures, colloquiums and conferences displayed on the campus of a “top” university in Hong Kong, the University of Hong Kong (HKU). The study draws on multimodal discourse studies and social theories of branding to analyze how different discursive components and semiotic placements of the posters create particular social meanings and values for the academic events and/or institutions. It identifies several dominant “tropes of branding” emerging from the displayed posters such as global connection and leadership, hierarchical internationalization with local advantage and interdisciplinarity. It shows how these tropes manifest or resonate with HKU’s more general self-branding enterprise of building itself into “Asia’s Global University”. The chapter concludes by discussing how its findings can deepen our understanding of institutionality in the areas of higher education and academia under the conditions of neoliberalism and globalization. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Students are now living in a world that is both rapidly changing and complex. This study aims to examine the effects of school subjects and the classroom climate they create on 15-year-old students’ global competence. A multilevel analysis was conducted on a representative sample of 5,873 Hong Kong participants in PISA 2018. The results showed that student perception of a better classroom disciplinary climate contributes to their global competence directly (.07) and indirectly via their skills in mathematics (.03), science (.03), and reading (.07) at the student level, and indirectly via their skill in reading (.38) at the school level. In addition, about one-third (.32) of the variance of global competence was explained at the school level. These findings suggest that schools play an essential role in cultivating students’ global competence, via traditional learning in core subjects such as mathematics, science, and reading, and a good learning environment. Copyright © 2021 HKERA-APERA International Conference.

Operating as a hegemonic, market-driven governmentality, neoliberalism has been colonizing academic institutions and academic professionals’ everyday lives globally. This article demonstrates how several sets of academic event posters displayed at a public Hong Kong university work as spatialized multimodal branding devices that discursively entangle certain types of individuals, activities, institutions, and political economy under a specific mode of neoliberal governmentality. It shows that the posters position the university and its academic units as internationally competitive, Global-North-oriented knowledge enterprises in a mutually shaping relationship with a globalized neoliberal political economy par excellence in Asia. The study signals the need for research on neoliberal academic discourses to pay closer attention to the spatialized, multi-semiotic nature of discursive practices and the multi-layered institutional, politico-economic and cultural contexts in which the neoliberal discourses are situated. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s).

Capacity building is a term widely used in relation to different organisations and public institutions for improvement. This chapter aims to discuss how RE can be better sustained through capacity building at the individual, institutional and societal levels by comparing the RE practices amongst a local university, the Education University of Hong Kong and some universities in United Kingdom, including the University of Manchester, University of Sheffield and the University of Cambridge. It is expected that a better understanding of the relationship between capacity building and RE advancement, including both its credits and limitations, can be achieved through this chapter. Suggestions for further strengthening RE in universities by capacity building in the three different levels will be recommended. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.