Pilot Runs

This subject was piloted to the students majoring, minoring or otherwise having a significant interest and background in information technology in Semester 2-3, 2011/12. Some students were responsibile for more tenhnically challenging tasks such as programming while some less technically challenging tasks such as multi-media design.

The Pilot Run

Pre-project Preparation

A total of five lectures were given to introduce students to the concept of service learning and educate them on the impact of methods by technology on the community. A total of twelve workshops were organized to provide students with training on the technological skills that they would need in their service projects and educate them on the ethical, cultural and historical issues that they would encounter in their projects. 

A trial project was held before the actual service project. The objective was to help students get familiar with the concept of providing service in the low-risk setting. It was also an opportunity for the teachers to assess students' performance when confronted with unfamiliarity and their skills in teamwork and communication.

Implementation

Students were given a choice of three options:

• Cambodia - Students would participate in various tasks, ranging from conducting surveys in slum areas to teaching animation programming in orphanages and teaching computer literacy in the community centre. 
• Hong Kong. Students would organize and teach classes of Photoshop, Flash animation, Storytelling and Cantonese to refugees from South Asia and Africa. 
• IT Development - Two developmental projects were sourced: the development of a human resources database for an NGO in Cambodia; and the development of an iPhone app for YMCA in Hong Kong.

Assessment

Students were required to write reflective journals after each service session. After each service session, there was a face-to-face reflective session for students to share their experience. At the end, students had to write a final report in the form of a webpage and give a final project presentation.

Evaluation of the Pilot Runs

To a large extent, all of the learning outcomes have been achieved:

• By the end of the project, most students found that they were more able to understand the plight and needs of the underpriviledged in the society. For some students particularly those working on the Cambodia projects, this took quite a bit of guidance as they were often distracted by the friendly demeanour of their clients and often mistook that for contentment or even prosperity and peace. 
• Most students were motivated to reflect more on the society. Quite a number of the students commented in their reflective sessions that they were motivated to think more about their role in the society or had already taken action to increase their involvement in the community after the project.
• Many of the students felt that their participation and contribution did not seem to meet the immediate needs of the clients. Guidance was needed to help these students see the long-term benefits of their work, especially in the role that information and computer literacy play in education and the prosperity of the society.

Efficacy of the Curriculum and Pedagogical Design

It was believed that the curriculum and pedagogical design of the subject is effective, as reflected by students' performances and attitudes in their service projects, reflective journals and reports:

Feedback from the Students

Feedback was collected from the students via their reflective journals and reports. Most students reported that they found the subject very demanding yet rewarding. Meanwhile, many students reported they needed to spend much more time than they expected. 

Feedback from the Collaborators/ Partners

Feedback was colelcted from the project collaborators and partners via interviews and emails. The collaborators were generally happy with the performance of the students and many of them commented that the students were professional, helpful and caring. They also remarked that their contribution brought impact to the clients whom they were serving. 

Lesson Learned

• Reflective sessions are key in the learning process, but students need to be guided through the reflective sessions. Left to their own devices, students' observations tend to be very superficial. Guidance and probing is needed to help them to ex lore further and think outside of the box.
• Overseas projects involve a great deal of logi stics and coordination. Where possible, relationships should be nurtured with partner NOOs and longer-term commitments built up. This will not only allow more impactful work to be done; but it will also reduce the amount of overhead by amortizing the initial setup effort .
• For especially challenging project s, it is important to give students adequate preparation and if possible, to "ease" them gently into the project. For our projects where students would be working in very challenging environments with difficult clients, we used the Hong Chi project as a "tester" project , to first give students a taste of what it would mean to go outside of their comfort zone, and also to evaluate them on their readiness to tackle some of the more challenging projects.
• Manpower is very important in service learning subjects. We were fortunate to have a team teaching this subject - and in fact, team teaching is probably one of the most effective ways of teaching service learning. We were also fortunate to have a large number of dedicated TAs who were able to help us to supervise students. We also used senior students who were recruited to return as team leaders and assessors for the project. We feel that this is a model that could help reduce the workload for service learning.
• It is important to manage the expectations of the students. The term "community service" itself implies that you are going to help people; from there, many students get this preconception that their effort s will be making a difference. While that is definitel y the case (service projects are required to be benefi cial to our partners as well as our students), many students have an inflated idea of the impact that they can make. It is therefore important to manage their expectations throughout the subject.
• It is equally important to manage the expectations of our partners. It is very easy for NGO staff to get an unrealistic view of the abilitie s of our students or the qualities of the services that they can del iver. If expectations are not managed, disappointm ent will inevitably occur and this may jeopardize future service projects. Th is is especially important for development pr oj ects (e.g. software deve lopmen t or website development), which, even in the real world, are notoriously prone to overruns both in cost and time.
• It may be necessary to provide some mechanism to allow subject lec turers to update or refine their subjects. Service learning is still a very new thing here at PolyU, and many lecturers will probably wish to make changes to their projec ts, and hence their subject learning outcomes and objectives, after they have gotten more experience. At the same time, the university needs to ensure the quality and the ge nuineness of the subjects. Therefore, some sort of a mechanism to allow updating (and if necessary, re-validation) of subjects should be put in place. Many academic departments have a similar mechanism to allow subject lecturers to update syllabi of "ordinary" subjects.