SDG4 Quality Education
Background
As 'Asia's Global University', HKU's core mission is to provide holistic education of the highest international standards for all students, including the disadvantaged, to fully develop their intellectual and personal strengths, advance human knowledge, and benefit society. The university’s world-class Faculty of Education has taken up a pioneering role in educational research and professional training regionally and internationally, and has contributed greatly to the development of education policy in Hong Kong. HKU also strives to provide lifelong learning opportunities for all through e-learning classes on the HKU Online Learning and Massive Open Online Courses (MOCCs) platform, which covers subjects including engineering, health, humanities and more, for free public enrolment. Furthermore, the university is host to a wide variety of on-campus activities and programmes as well as off-campus educational outreach activities in local schools and the community.
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of courses and research.
Teaching
80
courses
5,346
students enrolled
Research
158
papers (in 2017)
55%
of HKU students are
1st generation students*
*Estimation based on the survey administered by CEDARS on non-academic information from UGg new intake students. 2,265 FTE UGg students of first generation out of 4,125 FTE students starting a first degree.
Initiative
In Hong Kong, children with special educational needs are underserved due to a shortage of services, resulting in over 6,000 children on a waitlist for help. Aiming to close this gap, the University partnered with local NGO, Heep Hong Society, to develop an educational model to provide specialised therapy and teacher training. In the pilot project of 10 kindergartens, children demonstrated improvements in cognitive, language, motor and self-directed skills. The teachers involved also reported increase in self-efficacy. The model will be rolled out to 450 kindergartens over a two-year period, aiming to reduce the number of children on the waitlist to half the previous figure.
Making its impact beyond Hong Kong, HKU developed the East Asia-Pacific Early Child Development Scales (EAP-ECDS) to equip low-income countries with a common measurement tool to assess the developmental progress of children from 3 to 4 years of age. Recognised as a ‘Best of UNICEF Research’, the EAP-ECDS will not only provide recommendations to government and policy makers on more robust assessment and planning, it will also enhance research capacities in these countries through HKU’s technical support and training. The EAP-ECDS has also contributed to the monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goal Target 4.2 as a complementary tool to UNICEF’s Early Childhood Development Index (ECDI).
Operations
HKU believes that no student should be deprived of quality education due to financial constraints or family circumstances. For students who are the first generation in their families to attain higher education, they often lack the financial means and thereby the access to opportunities to participate in activities outside the classroom such as field trips, study tours, internships, service learning projects, exchange programmes and on-campus accommodation. The First-in-the-Family Education Fund (FIFE) was introduced in 2008 to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty and to implement the concepts of social mobility and serial reciprocity. To date, the fund has supported over 3,000 students in more than 3,750 activities. Not only are recipients of the fund given financial assistance for experiential learning activities, but they are also encouraged to “pay it forward” (受恩施恩、薪火相傳) by serving the community, and sharing their experience and learnings with fellow students. This cultivates and strengthens social conscience amongst the wider student body which they will bring with them into the larger society when they graduate.