The hole that I put in randomly made the palm look like a stylised Cyclops. I don’t know what to do with a Cyclops. So I put in another hole, two pointed ears and a hint of a neck to make a cat.
It came out looking more like Batman. Sometimes these things seem to have a mind of its own. I just provide the hands that carry out its will.
These results were published in the following conference paper: Kenneth W. K. Lo, Stephen C. F. Chan & Grace Ngai. “Capacity Building and Development for a Local Community through Engineering Service-Learning Projects – A 5-year study in Rural Cambodia”, IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC 2018), October 18-21, 2018, San Jose, California, USA.
In the process, many of our staff (Kenneth, Kin, Jessie, Wing, Cindy, Artemis, Eugene, Sean, KP, Wai, Jeice, …, in fact, the whole office) have learned, grown, matured, … - directly or indirectly. Kenneth, in particular, has become our “Old Cambodia Hand”, who has been to Cambodia 20+ times, conducting reconnaissance, making connections, creating new projects, preparing for projects, purchasing equipment and material, supervising projects, researching, … He has also leveraged his vast experience into the role of a “chief of operations” of many more projects not only in Cambodia, but also in Hong Kong, Rwanda, … We are so grateful to Cambodia as a wonderful training ground for our team.
During the process of setting up the NGO, both parties shared views on different social issues and developed a mutual understanding. The local leaders learned how to formally assess community needs, understand specifications and requirements of engineering projects and the resources involved, from both NGO & local village, in supporting these types of projects. In the meantime, the research team developed our intercultural competence, which enabled us to understand the dynamics between villagers, communicate with local people, and collect their feedback. All these contributed to improving and expanding the projects.
In 2016, the homestay program and the community learning center were replicated at a village in Koh Dach Island, located about 21 km east of Phnom Penh.
The same year, a new solar project was started, during which students from PolyU installed public charging stations for a group of nearby households to provide them with electricity. Families could charge their batteries from the station, and our students assembled the solar panels and wired up homes with basic electrical appliances such as lighting and mobile phone charging. These projects were extended to three villages located in Kampong Speu province to the west of Phnom Penh in 2017.
Young People Do has become a small-but-mighty, much-trusted partner in many projects.
For sustainability and long-term upkeep, the ownership of the center belong to the village - not only in formal terms but also in the reality of day-to-day operations. However, the village also had to be equipped to operate and maintain it. To build up their capacity, a scholarship scheme was set up for three resident university students, covering 50% of their tuition fee. In return, they organize and conduct a weekly 3-hour session for the village children in the learning center. Since volunteering was new to local students, and they did not have any experience with organizing or coordinating activities, hence we provided them with on-site training and established an online platform to give them emotional and technical support, and opportunities to share their experiences and reflections with the project team.
A return visit was conducted six months after the installation of the learning center. It had become a public area of social activity. On average 45 people (25 kids, 10 youths and 10 adults and elderly) visited on a regular weekday. Children usually visited after school to read and play with the toys, teenagers came in to access the Internet, adults used the space around to gather and share news and information, and the elderly residents came to learn basic communication skills in English. The community proactively contributed to the books and toys in the center. Two months after the installation, the villagers initiated a fundraising campaign to purchase additional books and other resources. In total, over 50 books in Khmer (the local language) were bought or collected, and other teaching resources, such as school bags, stationery, and coloring books were purchased.
While running the community center, the community leaders not only enhanced their leadership skills but also built up their capacity to address the underlying structural issues that gave rise to their needs. Together with the scholarship students, they initiated a number of projects to serve the surrounding communities, such as an elderly care program for families from a nearby slum and an English workshop for the children nearby. In the meantime, one of the leaders, who was working in a local NGO, started to invite different overseas teams to join the homestay program and offered to organize short courses or construction projects for the primary school.
In the meantime, we learned that many adults from the village were working in Phnom Penh or even outside Cambodia, and only the children and elderly stayed at home. This leaves behind a lot of children and elderly with limited support. After discussion with the villagers and some local volunteers, we decided together to set up a homestay program for our students who were conducting the STEM workshop, partly as a method of income generation for the community, while our students experience village life and culture in an immersive environment. This homestay program started with four houses, which can accommodate around 30 people. The rest of the community also benefit through being involved in the running of a centralized kitchen, or providing transportation in the form of oxcarts or other farm transportation vehicles.
By 2018, the homestay program was in its sixth year and has hosted not only PolyU, but also many other youth organizations. In total, it has hosted almost 500 young people from Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, US, and Australia. Encouraged by this success, the local organization has initiated efforts on replicating this program in another community in a neighboring province.
After the projects initiated in 2013, we used the “Lab in a Suitcase” to conduct other STEM workshops in June 2014, while continuing to build trust and relationship between the university, the neighborhood and local organizations. The villagers understood our motivation, and were enthusiastic to engage. Their behaviors and responses also changed accordingly. For example, when we first started doing home visits, we were asked to prepare a small bag of rice as a ceremonial gift as per local custom, and partially to motivate the villagers to receive us. But after one year, we became much welcomed friends and the villagers are eager to share stories about their family and themselves with us. These projects become very successful both in terms of providing a valuable service, as well as building a trusting relationship with the community.
Armed with three years of experience in Cambodia, in 2013 our team started a university-community partnership project in Somrong village, Sen Sok district, which at that point was a semi-rural area 14 km away from the capital city of Phnom Penh. The villagers’ lives revolve around farming. A number of the younger residents have departed to work in factories and businesses in the city or even abroad. Most of the large number of children in the community study at a government primary school nearby. The site was on the main electrical grid, and therefore electricity is available, though still expensive and unreliable, with frequent blackouts and brownouts. Running water was not available, and water was collected from rainfall or bought from the city. There is no land-line phone service, and the villagers rely on cellular for communication and access to the Internet.
The successful implementation of the engineering projects in Cambodia and Rwanda with non-engineering students working side by side with engineering students vindicated our belief that non-engineering are capable of successfully carrying out an engineering projects if the projects are well-chosen, well-planned and the students well-trained. As for themselves, the non-engineering students pick up basic engineering skills that they never thought they were capable of. In the process they develop new-found respect and appreciation for engineering, as well as self-confidence in themselves. It can only be good for themselves, their career, and society as a whole. These pleasing outcomes are not originally part of the service-learning curriculum but are gratifying nevertheless.
The intended student learning outcomes designed for the courses themselves were fully evaluated with three approaches: (1) grading by the teaching team according to the subject rubrics, (2) self-reported post-experience survey and (3) reflective journals submitted after the completion of the projects. The subject grading is composed of three components corresponding to the three phases of the services: preparation, execution, and reflection. Each student was accessed by the two subject teachers and two tutors individually, and a meeting was organized to finalize the overall grade, reconciling differences between the marks assigned by the different members of the teaching team. This is important to ensure consistency and fairness across all components, students and graders.
Regarding the grading, engineering students received a slightly higher grade on average than the non-engineering students. However, the standard deviation in all aspects of the non-engineering group is higher. Among the top 20% of the students, 11 of them are non-engineering students while 6 of them are engineering students. Hence the best of the non-engineering students perform just as well as the engineering students, if not better. This situation also happens to the bottom 20% of the team, in which 3 students are non-engineering and 14 of them are students in technical disciplines.
Demonstration of empathy, intellectual and civic learning outcomes scales were found to be highly reliable while demonstration of application of knowledge and skills and understanding of the linkage between SL and academic learning can be considered as having an acceptable reliability. Data on two of the learning outcomes (Self-reflection and Social) suggested that the reliabilities of those sub-scales are marginally acceptable.
Among the eight learning outcomes, the mean score is highest for the personal aspect for both engineering students and non-engineering students. Whereas the mean score on self-reflection is the lowest - but which is still significantly higher than the mid-point 4 (“a fair amount”). The standard deviations of the scores ranged from 0.58 to 0.79 for the engineering group and 0.56 to 0.86 for the non-engineering group. Four learning outcomes have a higher rating from non-engineering students while two outcomes have a higher rating from engineering students. However, the differences are small.
In conclusion, statistically, no significant differences exist between the two groups. Ditto from the reflection journals. It shows that the multidisciplinary approach can benefit both the engineering and non-engineering students. What makes this work are the engineering professors and their assistants who are willing to work extra hard, to take on the additional challenge and prevail. They are truly passionate educators deserving the utmost respect. These results were published in the following conference paper: Lo, K. W. K., Lau, C. K., Chan, S. C. F. & Ngai, G. “When Non-engineering Students work on an International Service-Learning Engineering Project – A Case Study”, 2017 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC 2017), San Jose, October 2017.
However, these programs are only offered to engineering students. From our own experience, we have been convinced that non-engineering students can be equipped with the basic engineering skills to participate effectively in technology-driven service-learning projects. Taking this approach involves certain risks. If successful, however, it opens up the opportunity to participate in many impactful service-learning projects to a much wider range of students who have been excluded previously. These projects can also benefit from the input of fresh input from students who approach the project from very different perspectives.
We have experimented with this approach through a number of service-learning courses, one of which is a 2-semester service-learning subject offered by the Department of Computing - “Technology Beyond Borders: Service Learning across Cultural, Ethnic and Community Lines" which is open to all undergraduate students. The course carried out a wide range of projects over many years. A case study focused on 85 students involved in infrastructure improvement projects in rural villages in Cambodia and Rwanda in 2015 and 2016. Out of the 85 students, 51 (60%) of them were from year 1, 30 (35%) of them were from year 2, and the remaining 4 (5%) students were in year 3. Among all the students, only 32 (38%) were from engineering while the rest were from a variety of disciplines including health sciences, pure sciences, and the humanities. This diversity poses extra challenges to the teaching of this course resulting in gratifying learning gains for the students.
There were two major projects. One is a Solar Energy System for villagers: The solar power solutions took the form of a public charging station shared between a group of nearby households. Families could recharge their battery from the station, with each station charging up to 6 batteries at the same time. Our students assembled the solar panels and wired up homes with basic electrical appliances. Also, using local sustainable materials, such as coconuts or palm branches, we assembled LED lights for the villagers.
Two is a Community Learning Centre: To provide an informal learning space for village children and youths, both to supplement their regular school education, as well as to serve as a resource for continued education and self-guided study. Two 20-foot-long empty recycled shipping containers were transformed into a computer learning center and library respectively. A rooftop photovoltaic generator, a rainwater collection system, and ten low-cost computers were installed. In conjunction with the learning center, students deployed a customized computer library with electronic learning resources to teach the local children about science and engineering.
Some key challenges for teachers throughout the project include:
Once the team got onto the field, the second phase training was put into motion with the local students. In 2015 and 2016, 11 and 33 Cambodian students joined the team respectively. Their major was either in English or development studies. Even though they did not previously have contact with the team from Hong Kong, working in the same group for 7 hours a day and participating in various orientation and site visit activities strengthened the team spirit and helped them to understand the situation in the target community. The team spent four days testing and training in a local university to finalize the design, assemble the solar systems, LEDs and test all the deliverables. This on-site training allowed the Hong Kong students to transfer the knowledge and skills to the Cambodian students.
The projects were implemented successfully. All the targets were met, and the community was very happy with the results. It is a gratifying validation - that the non-engineering can be counted on to implement engineering project if the project is well-planned, and the students well-trained.
For some reason, their results are not often presented and published in conferences such as IARSLCE. More likely, they appear in conferences such as IEEE GHTC (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Global Humanitarian Technology Conference). IEEE is the largest technical professional organization for the advancement of technology. It is strongly committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion and sees no place for hatred and discrimination in their communities. A real life humanitarian project may include needs assessment, academic, governmental and community partnering, engineering economics, sustainability, community ownership, entrepreneurship, and long-term engagement. Sample projects can include installation of solar panels to generate electricity, bicycle-powered electricity generator, solar-powered aquaponics, improved indoor/outdoor cooking stoves, a human-powered nebuliser, a wireless network for disaster relief, etc. This type of service-learning is sometimes referred to as “technology-driven service-learning”. Presumably the central role of technology in this type of service-learning may be the reason that researchers and practitioners in this area tend to come from engineering-related disciplines and gravitate towards conferences such as IEEE GHTC.
Well designed engineering projects based on solid technology have proven to be able to make tremendous impact in the lives of disadvantaged communities. For villagers that have never had electrical power, that have been living all their lives around the availability (and unavailability) of natural sunlight - to now be able to work, cook, study, until late at night because of the electricity generated from the solar panels installed on the roofs of their own houses is obviously life-changing. For villagers who have lived for all their lives with dysentery due to the lack of clean water to suddenly have access to cleaner water from a properly designed water filtration project carried out by well-trained students led by their professor is evidently life-saving. That engineering service-learning can make such impact should not be surprising. Engineering itself was invented and honed through centuries and centuries into a tremendous amount of expertise to put solid science in the service of mankind. It is just that conventionally engineering knowledge is put to use by those who can afford it, but disadvantaged people cannot afford it. If such expensively put together expertise can be put to use for the disadvantaged, the impact can certainly be huge.
In the mean time, communities such as those around IARSLCE seems to focus more on the forms, methods, pedagogies, research frameworks, etc., and are populated more by researchers in disciplines such as education, humanities, social sciences, etc. Very often, however, they do not have access to the professional, discipline-specific expertise to tackle many of the hard challenges faced by the disadvantaged. It should be obvious there is potentially tremendous synergy between the researchers concentrating on the pedagogy of service-earning and those focusing on the technologies that can be applied to service-learning projects.
On the other hand, service-learning has conventionally been regarded as a “high-touch” learning activity. Increasingly, technology has been used to enhance the interaction. These include social media to facilitate group work, multi-media and game-like environments to enliven the interaction, augmented-reality and virtual reality to enrich the experience, and much more. The social distancing imposed by the pandemic in 2020 made face-to-face, physical interaction practically impossible and forced much SL to be scaled back drastically or even cancelled. At the same time, it created a vacuum into which technology can step in to play a much greater role in facilitating SL. In some cases they almost completely replaced physical interactions. We shall refer to this the of service-learning as “technology-facilitated service-learning”, and discuss it in more depth in a subsequent chapter.
At PolyU we have benefited from our strong engineering and hard science backgrounds in our service-learning. Professors have already created many SL courses where their expertise has been put to use tackling hard problems. We have also been increasingly using technology to enhance the practice of service-learning: online teaching, STEM education, game-like tools to facilitate group work, video-conference-based global classrooms, virtual environments for hack-a-thons, … These are the “Technology-driven/enhanced/facilitated Service-Learning’s” (TxSLs) where we will be investing a lot of our energy.
“For over twenty years, IARSLCE has been known to thousands of scholars as a network that helps to consolidate the value of SLCE for our understanding of the world and communities and has helped to launch the scholarship of many brilliant publicly engaged researchers.
IARSLCE is the only international organization whose expressed primary purpose is to cultivate, encourage, and present research across all engagement forms and educational levels; and it fulfills its mission by embracing all research frameworks (e.g., positivist, interpretive, participatory, critical, etc.), methods (e.g., qualitative, quantitative, mixed, etc.), and approaches (e.g., basic, applied, action, engaged, evaluation, etc.). The Association promotes high quality trans-disciplinary research across a wide range of approaches and forms and builds the capacity of scholars, practitioners, and community partners to engage in such research.”
For almost 20 years, until it was interrupted by the Coronavirus pandemic, IARSLCE has been running a flagship annual international conference, mostly somewhere in the USA, usually attended by hundreds and hundreds of people from all over the world. Our team has been attending the IARSLCE conference and presenting our work there since 2016.
Through the paper and poster presentations at the conference, we are able to learn about the state of the art in the implementation of SL courses across the world, learn from them and benchmark against them. We are happy to note that our understanding of the core concepts and the application are comparable with the best. We have, of course, learned a lot about a wide range of research methods. We are able to adopt some of them important findings to our own work.
Through IARSLCE, we get to know many of the leading researchers and practitioners, and are able to draw on their expertise by engaging them as speakers at seminars, workshops and conferences for our colleagues back home as well as those in the Asia-Pacific region. Because of the great distance, most in the Asia-Pacific find it difficult to travel to these conferences. Hence bringing some of the excellent speakers to our region is one way to draw our community closer to the world-wide community.
Further, we are able to develop many collaborations with leading universities in SL. These include student exchange, joint projects, on-line co-teaching in a global classroom, joint research, and other innovations. Many of these exciting projects are discussed in more detail elsewhere in this book. These are probably some of the most valuable results of our participation in IARSLCE.
We have, of course, been presenting and publishing many papers through IARSLCE. These enable us to share our results with a wide audience, and compare our results with the state of the art. Through the process, we become aware that the IARSLCE community, despite its continued efforts to internationalise and diversify, is still heavily North American-centric. There are significant SL communities in South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, who are under-represented at IARSLCE. Surely, these communities can benefit more from the wealth of expertise at IARSLCE, and the IARSLCE community can also benefit from the diversity of challenges, experiences and insights from these communities - if we can bring these communities closer together. For this reason, Dr. Stephen Chan joined the IARSLCE Board of Directors in 2019.
For example, in the Asia-Pacific region there are many governments that are authoritarian to various degrees - it can obviously pose challenges to SL projects which attempt to address root causes of inequality, in areas of political power, freedom, economic opportunities, education, etc. In many countries, there are also strong influences of religion faiths and distinctive cultural practices in many aspects of life, which may pose different types of challenges to SL. On the other hand, the multi-ethnic and multi-religion environment in many Asian countries expose the youths to a plurality of experiences and challenges. In many Asian countries, young people are highly adapt in advanced information technology and social media. These characteristics pose serious challenges bur many also be conducive towards a very dynamic Sl community. In the face of social isolation imposed by the Coronavirus, these factors are becoming more and more relevant.
The IARSLCE community also appears to be populated more by people in social science and humanities, with fewer participants from hard sciences and engineering. It does not appear that the hard science and engineering disciplines are inactive in SL. Perhaps for some reason they tend to congregate around other events or groups, such as the GHTC. Hence there is plenty of room for growth at IARSLCE, in terms of internationalisation and diversity.
The new student e-Learning course “Learn to Serve, Serve to Learn” consists of the following units:
The course include a wide variety of learning activities, such as short videos, concept tests, case studies experience sharing by students who have completed service-learning subjects. Based on the the first and second rounds of the pilot run, the visualisation of the content was further improved, with enhanced graphics to provide a better learning experience. The course was fully implemented at the 4 participating institutions in the second semester of 2019/20 with an enrolment of over 2,300 students.
The e-Learning course can serve multiple purposes. The basic concepts have to be taught in essentially all SL courses. By adopting the e-Learning course, a SL teacher can avoid duplicating the effort that went into developing the e-Learning course, and concentrating on the specific content for his/her own course. It can also be used to ensure a degree of consistency in the teaching of basic concepts. Some teachers also use the e-Learning course as part of a flipped-classroom approach. After the students have gone through the e-Learning course, the teacher brings them to face-to-face discussions on a specific topic based on the material covered in the e-Learning course.
I thought I was back to normal on Saturday, after running 12 kilometres, 4 days after failing to get out of bed on Tuesday, having the world spinning around me because of BPPV. Some friends and relatives were warning me that I shouldn’t rush things.
They were right. On Sunday morning, I got up again with the room spinning around me. This time I was better prepared. I lied down, asked my dear wife to perform the same manoeuvres on me, and waited. By noon I was able to get up and walk around a little, gingerly, staring straight ahead. Our good friend P brought us good lunch, washed down with the delicious thick vegetable soup that my wife made earlier. As the afternoon wore on while we chatted, I got better.
In the past week, I have been learning quite a bit about BPPV from my wife’s research, my own research, Dr. Kwong, the experience of my sister, my mother, my sister-in-law E, my colleague H, my friend L, my friend M’s mother, … I have learned that it is something that has no cure, yet. That is something that I have to learn to live with for the rest of my wife.
Today I am back to the office. If you find me walking around as if I have had several beers or glasses of wine, be assured that I am not drunk. In fact, I have not had any alcohol at all today. It is the after-shock of BPPV. I just have a little difficulty balancing myself.
Funding from this Teaching Development Grant was used to develop the “Service-Learning Pedagogy & Practice” e-Learning course fort teachers. The course consists of the following units:
There are some contents, such as the basic concepts of SL, that are similar to those in the e-Learning course for students. But the majority of the content are quite different. The difference is a little like the difference between a textbook for students and the teachers’ guide for using a textbook.
Teacher Training Course
The e-Learning course is then used as part of a teacher training course “Service-Learning in Higher Education: Teacher Development Course”. Details of the course has been discussed in an earlier section (7a) in this book, under the topic of the UGC Teaching Award. Part of the award money was used to subsidise the operation of the teacher development course. This way the course can be financially viable while keeping the course fee low.
The teacher development course was designed to run in face-to-face mode in Hong Kong, with a field experience trip to Cambodia, as was done in summer 2019. In 2020, however, the social distancing imposed by the coronavirus pandemic made travelling impossible. Hence the teacher development course was run in online mode, with 22 participants (10 from PolyU, 5 from University of Hong Kong, 4 from Open University of HK, 2 from Baptist University, 1 from Education University). This kind of teacher training for service-learning is currently in short supply in Asia Pacific.
e-Learning Course for Teachers (Chinese Version)
The Chinese version of the e-Learning course is being developed with an aim to offer it to secondary school teachers in Hong Kong as part of a campaign to promote service-learning in the secondary school sector.
With separate funding support being arranged, the e-Learning course will also be offered on other platforms to reach a wider audience in Hong Kong and Mainland China. Hopefully these effort will go some way towards addressing the severe lack of teaching material in the Chinese language for service-learning.
