The 3-3-4 scheme for Hong Kong’s senior secondary education and higher education has been implemented for some years. On one hand, subjects are now more diversified to nurture a broader scope of views and life-long learning abilities for students, and the traditional division of “arts stream subjects” and “science stream subjects” no longer exists. On the other hand, such heterogeneity poses a problem for science education at higher education level, as some university students majoring in science do not have sufficient prior knowledge in science at all.
Another major problem faced by science educators nowadays is that many students are unmotivated and not persistent to acquire the required scientific knowledge and skills. Educators have had a hard time addressing questions like “How to motivate students for self-learning?”, “How to arouse students’ interests in studying science?”, “How to keep their studying momentum?” and “How to correlate the lecture contents to our daily life?”
In 2016 and 2017, the course “BIOL3016 Environmental Health and Toxicology” at HKBU was supported by the Course Enhancement Fund from UGC and the internal seed funding at HKBU for the projects entitled “Enhancing Information Literacy in Hong Kong Higher Education” and “Developing Online Courses/Blended Learning Initiatives with FutureLearn”, respectively. These projects not only pinpointed the above-mentioned teaching and learning challenges, but also fostered internationalisation, aligning with the global trend and HKBU’s Institutional Strategic Plan 2018-2028.