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Testimonials

How our users use  YOCLE 

YOCLE is highly customisable, and here are some success stories from our users

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Dr Matthias Buehlmaier,

Business School, 

The University of Hong Kong

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Dr Rebecca Yu Shan Lam
Lecturer, School of Chinese
The University of Hong Kong

"In my current (Chinese) course, we encourage students to learn not just in classroom, but also outside the classroom. YOCLE has numerous functions which can help us enhance our student engagement and facilitate a better learning environment."

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Dr Rebecca Lam
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Collecting, sharing, and discussing daily life examples

There are many opportunities for students to learn in their daily life. We have asked them to pay attention to the environment around them, and to try to look for grammatical or other Chinese usage errors they come across with, and post them in the What's Up section of YOCLE. My students loved this way of learning, and posted more than 400 photos during the course, some of them leading to further discussions in class.

 

Collecting these examples is their first learning process. The second learning process takes place when other students comment on the photos or ask questions about them. A lot of students became curious and took the initiative to look them up in dictionaries or credible sources to find out the correct answers. It is a compelling example of self-motivating learning. All the comments and answers inspire their peers to think or reflect, thereby consolidating their knowledge in Chinese.

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Building a community with privacy

Keeping a close connection with students is important in eLearning. We’ve used YOCLE as a platform for instant messaging. In order to register, all we need is an email address; teachers and student do not need to disclose their phone numbers. Students can chat with each other informally, and teachers can also interact with students. Most students find this way more natural as it resembles their usual way of communicating.

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Developing and assessing generic skills

Most of the employers today expect our students to be flexible, to show initiative, and to have the ability to undertake many different tasks, so generic skills are becoming more essential in job seeking. Apart from helping students to excel in Chinese oral and writing skills, my course tries to embed generic skills into students with the support of the teaching development grant.

 

The built-in and validated instrument, Generic Skills Perception Questionnaire, allows students to assess the level of competence of generic skills, so students can have a better understanding of their strengths and weaknesses.

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After that, we provided students with a set of assignments which we have designed to strengthen their generic skills: such as writing a self-reflection, joining online discussion forums, and doing group projects with classmates. These learning experiences can be harnessed and translated back into the classroom through critical reflection.

 

Learning outcomes and rubrics templates on the different generic skills are available in YOCLE, which makes it easier for teachers and teaching assistants. Assessors and peers can simply click the boxes in YOCLE’s rubrics to give feedback to others.

 

One very distinctive function of YOCLE is that the system will generate a rating chart on generic competencies of each student according to performance. Students can see and compare their results in order to gain a more well-rounded understanding of their own generic skills. Students loved this function.

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Bonus: Here's video of original presentation!

Originally Presented at the International Virtual Forum in Teaching and Learning

Students-as-Partners in Online Learning – Voices from HKU

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Dr Matthias Buehlmaier
Principal Lecturer in Finance
Director of BBA(IBGM)
Faculty of Business and Economics
The University of Hong Kong

  • Winner of Outstanding Teaching Award 2020

  • Winner of Teaching Innovation Award 2020

Dr Matthia Buehlmaier

Dr Beuhlmaier on Social Learning

The Importance of Social Learning

Social learning, which means that students learn from each other and with each other, is an excellent way to build a community. What is also important is incorporating people from the industry so that they can communicate with students (through the app), and help students figure out what are the parts of their learning that can be used in their future practice.

Originally Presented at the HKU Excellence Awards for 2020

Winner of Outstanding Teaching Award 2020 

Winner of Teaching Innovation Award 2020

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Pioneering Social Learning in Business Education with YOCLE

We use YOCLE as a social networking app in the context of teaching and learning.

 

We use the chat function as a medium for both group and individual chats. A nice thing is that it’s very easy to register and install, and we don’t have to provide our mobile phone numbers. All students have to do is sign onto the app, and contact me through the app at any time.

 

The second thing is a function called What’s Up, and here students can post any pictures, diagrams, or figures related to the course for the whole class to see. People can then like or write comments underneath it. Students will usually share things they are working, and it is a very social form of learning, where students can learn from each other and get encouraged by seeing the other students making good progress and working hard.

 

The third part is a reflective journal that students can write in the app. All they have to do is open the app and start typing directly on their mobile phone, which makes it very easy and straightforward to use. It’s basically a diary in the context of teaching and learning that students can write throughout the course. This is a very important element for collecting evidence of learning as well, as the instructor can really see that the students are really learning, that they make progress and that the learning is effective.

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