Billy Tak-Ming Wong

• Senior Research Coordinator at Hong Kong Metropolitan University

This study aims to examine the use of learning analytics in course evaluation within higher education institutions, in order to identify effective methodologies and best practices for leveraging data to improve educational effectiveness. Following the PRISMA guidelines, a systematic literature search was conducted in Scopus, yielding 34 relevant st...

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and STEAM (by including Arts) education (hereafter STE(A)M education) has been widely studied and practiced. Evaluation plays an important role in assessing and improving the effectiveness of relevant initiatives. Although there has been extensive research on evaluating STE(A)M education, lit...

Smart education has been practiced in many academic disciplines. To investigate the relationship between the implementation of smart education and the nature of academic disciplines, this paper presents a systematic review to address the literature gap. The study synthesized 110 journal articles collected from Scopus, which were published between 2...

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of knowledge graphs in education. It covers the patterns and prospects of research in this area. A total of 48 relevant publications between 2011 and 2023 were collected from the Web of Science, Scopus, and ProQuest for review. The findings reveal a sharp increase in recent years in the body of research in...

This paper presents a study on the features and patterns of teaching and learning innovations in open and distance learning universities. The study covers 19 universities across the globe. Based on the information from their institutional websites, the teaching and learning innovations claimed by the universities were identified and categorised int...

This study aims to investigate the Chinese and English language proficiency of tertiary students in Hong Kong through the unique lens of translation. An error-annotated translation learner corpus—the Hong Kong Student Translation (HKST) corpus, a subset of the Multilingual Student Translation (MUST) initiative—was developed following the standard o...

STEM and STEAM (or STE(A)M) education has been widely practised over the past two decades. It involves the disciplinary integration of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, as well as arts. Evaluation plays an essential role in assessing and improving the effectiveness of STE(A)M educational practices. Despite a broad range of research...

Smart education has become a prevalent way of education delivery to enhance learning effectiveness and efficiency in the digital age. Despite smart education being implemented in a widening range of disciplines, there has been a lack of comprehensive analysis on the disciplinary variation of smart education practices. This paper presents a review o...

Early identification of at-risk students has been recognised as being of the utmost importance for the provision of timely support. Despite the prevalent use of learning analytics in this regard, little attention has been paid to systematically surveying and summarising relevant latest work. To address the literature gap, this paper reviews the use...

The Chinese/English Political Interpreting Corpus (CEPIC) is an open access corpus with about 6.5 million word tokens. The corpus features verbatim transcriptions of original speeches and interpretations in Putonghua, Cantonese, and English. It is part-of-speech (POS) tagged and annotated with prosodic and paralinguistic features. This paper report...

This paper presents a review study on teaching and learning innovations (TLIs) for distance learning in higher education, which involves substantial use of technology in its practice. The study covers 247 publications that were published from 2017 to 2022 and collected from Scopus to analyze the patterns and trends of TLIs for distance learning in...

This paper presents a longitudinal study analysing the literature on the hybrid and flexible mode of learning (HyFlex learning) in terms of its research and practice over the past decade. A total of 84 articles published between 2013 and 2022 were collected from Scopus for analysis, covering their changes in publication patterns, research issues, f...

This paper presents a study on the evaluation of hybrid learning and teaching practices by academics. A mixed research method involving a questionnaire survey and a focus group interview was employed to gather academics’ feedback on their experience in delivering hybrid instruction in a synchronous manner in which on-site and remote students attend...

This paper reports a study on the perceived usefulness of university students on open educational resources (OER) in relation to the switch of learning mode to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. The participants involved two groups of students, one studying in a face-to-face mode and the other in a distance learning mode. They took part...

The worldwide pandemic of COVID-19 has inevitably changed the teaching and learning practices in higher education, where online and blended learning are adopted to different extents. This paper reports the latest status of university students’ perception on the use of open educational resources (OER), based on a survey conducted in a university in...

This paper reports an evaluation on the effectiveness of hybrid teaching from the perspective of academics. A questionnaire survey was conducted, which was participated by a total of 86 academic staff from a university in Hong Kong. Based on their experience in hybrid teaching for more than one semester, feedback from the academics was collected wh...

This paper presents a review of the contexts, objectives, means and features of smart learning practices. It covers a total of 107 articles collected from Scopus and ProQuest which were published between 2011 and 2020. The results illustrate the patterns and trends of smart learning which have been practised in a widening range of subject disciplin...

This chapter presents an institution-wide programme for building up its research capacity for a teaching university offering open and flexible programmes. The university is keen to excel in teaching through research which serves the strategic value of keeping its academics’ scholarly active and informing their teaching. The programme began with a n...

Among the key areas of student support, wellness has been regarded as crucial. While student services for wellness are commonplace in face-to-face teaching institutions, distance learning (DL) students have far fewer opportunities to access such services for the constraints of the DL context, and the services for conventional institutions do not su...

Student support, as a crucial part of educational delivery, is closely related to many aspects of students’ lives. Catering for students’ diverse needs for support services poses challenges for all education providers; and for institutions offering courses in different educational modes, the challenges are even greater. This chapter addresses the d...

This book explores a broad range of innovations in education, such as flipped classrooms, the educational use of social media, mobile learning and educational resources. It also includes theoretical discussions and practical applications related to the use of augmented reality and educational technologies for improving students’ engagement and faci...

This paper presents an evaluation of mobile learning practice for the clinical practicum in nursing education. Nursing students need to practise nursing skills and follow specific clinical procedures in wards. In this study, they were provided with a mobile device for learning purposes, with mobile apps preinstalled for watching nursing videos and...

Intervention has long been practised in higher education to provide assistance for at-risk or underachieving learners. With the development of learning analytics, the delivery of intervention has been informed by data-driven approaches to identify learners’ problems and provide them with just-in-time and personalised support. However, intervention...

Purpose This study aimed to identify the professional development needs of academics in Hong Kong higher education for the use of educational technology. Design/methodology/approach An online survey was conducted in 2017, which involved 374 academics from Hong Kong higher education institutions. The survey covered their perception and use of edu...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify the success factors and challenges for students studying in an open and distance learning (ODL) mode and recommend strategies for student persistence based on the findings. Design/methodology/approach Three groups of ODL students with various levels of study performance – nine high-level, nine mid...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify the teaching innovations that have been implemented in higher education institutions in Asia and the perspectives of educators on them. Design/methodology/approach Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 28 educators who were affiliated with 23 higher education institutions in ten Asian cou...

This paper reports a study on the relationships between the variables of nursing students' learning motivation, perception of their mobile learning practice and their study performance. A total of 225 undergraduate nursing students participated in the research. They used a mobile app for fostering clinical knowledge and skills acquired in class, an...

This paper reviews the evolution of e-learning in accounting education in Hong Kong tertiary institutions. As a case study, it also reports an evaluation of the effectiveness of e-learning in an accounting program. E-learning has been broadly employed in the higher education in Hong Kong as an important blended learning mode of knowledge-sharing an...

This paper reviews the adoption of massive open online courses (MOOCs) by higher education institutions for teaching on-campus courses, and summarises the good practices from relevant case studies. From a total of 28 case studies, it identifies the characteristics of MOOC adoption - platforms, course materials, approaches to facilitate interaction,...

Mobile and ubiquitous learning has been a key focus in e-learning and practising broadly worldwide. Among the research publications in this area, a majority of them focused on evaluating the effectiveness of relevant practices and reported positive outcomes. To interpret such results, the contexts in which mobile devices were used for learning and...

Purpose This paper aims to review and identify the major patterns and trends in learning analytics practices in higher education institutions. The review covers the characteristics of the institutions, as well as the characteristics and outcomes of the learning analytics practices. Design/methodology/approach This research collected literature p...

This paper reports an evaluation of the use of mobile devices by nursing students in clinical practicum. In this learning environment, nursing students have to apply their nursing skills and follow specific clinical procedures in real-life situations. Following the Framework for the Rational Analysis of Mobile Education (FRAME), this study involved...

Despite the growing popularity of learning analytics in higher education, its development status in Asia was barely studied. This paper reports a study on the development of learning analytics in higher education in Asia. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight senior managers or senior academics from various tertiary institutions in A...

Continuing professional development (CPD) refers to the ongoing learning and development in order to keep abreast of the advances and changes in a profession and perform competently. For accountancy professionals, CPD is needed throughout their careers. To cater for their needs in Hong Kong in terms of flexibility in time and place, the e-learning...

This study examined the effects of mobile apps on the learning motivation, social interaction and study performance of nursing students. A total of 20 students participated in focus group interviews to collect feedback on their use of mobile apps for learning and communicative activities. Two consecutive cohorts of students in a nursing programme,...

While learning analytics (LA) practices have been shown to be practical and effective, most of them require a huge amount of data and effort. This paper reports a case study which demonstrates the feasibility of practising LA at a low cost for instructors to identify at-risk students in an undergraduate business quantitative methods course. Instead...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the implementation of mobile learning in a nursing course at The Open University of Hong Kong, and identify the potentials of, and constraints on, introducing mobile technologies in the instructional design of nursing education. The paper also considers the pedagogical implications of the expansion o...

This paper reports a study on the effects of mobile apps on the learning motivation and study performance of nursing students. A total of 20 students participated in focus group interviews for collecting qualitative feedback on their learning motivation and use of mobile apps for learning. Two consecutive cohorts of students in a nursing programme,...

This paper reviews the evolution of e-learning in accounting programmes in Hong Kong and, as a case study, reports an evaluation of the effectiveness of e-learning in one of the programmes. The fast pace of economic development in Hong Kong since the 1960s has created an increasing demand for qualified professional accountants, who have been facing...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a systematic review of the mounting research work on learning analytics. Design/methodology/approach This study collects and summarizes information on the use of learning analytics. It identifies how learning analytics has been used in the higher education sector, and the expected benefits for high...

This study investigates the factors which influence university students' preferences in their learning processes, the orientations of their achievement goals, and the enhancement of their self-efficacy in learning. The examination of factors influencing these variables helps in devising measures to enhance students' metacognitive development. Fifty...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to survey the factors which facilitate effective teaching through massive open online courses (MOOCs). Design/methodology/approach A descriptive meta-analysis was conducted to first examine the literature covering the characteristics of teaching in MOOCs, the profile of participants, the instructional design of...

This paper describes a study on an open textbook project, which aims to establish a sustainable system for providing quality open textbooks for adoption and adaptation at minimal cost. A survey was conducted, covering 167 teachers in local primary and secondary schools, to determine how ready the school teachers are for using open textbooks and the...

This paper reports on an exploratorystudy of the influence of the pedagogic orientations of MOOC platforms on their courses. Four MOOC platforms — namely Coursera, edX, FutureLearn and OpenLearning — which illustrate their pedagogy on their websites were selected for this research.The pedagogic features of 32 courses on these platforms were examine...

For institutional policies associated with technology-enhanced learning (TEL) instruments, such as blended learning, mobile learning, massive open online courses, and open educational resources, their policy effectiveness is to a large extent affected by how ‘effectiveness’ is conceptualized. Studies on effectiveness of institutional policies revea...

This paper reports a preliminary study on the relationship between computer literacy and use of open educational resources (OER) of university students in Hong Kong. It reviews the technology infrastructure and Government support for enhancement of students’ computer literacy, and development of resources in the city, showing that Hong Kong has lai...

This paper reports the latest development of The Halliday Centre Tagger (the Tagger), an online platform provided with semi-automatic features to facilitate text annotation and analysis. The Tagger features a web-based architecture with all functionalities and file storage space provided online, and a theory-neutral design where users can define th...

This paper proposes the utilization of lexical cohesion to facilitate evaluation of machine translation at the document level. As a linguistic means to achieve text coherence, lexical cohesion ties sentences together into a meaningfully interwoven structure through words with the same or related meaning. A comparison between machine and human trans...

This paper studies how granularity of machine translation evaluation can be extended from sentence to document level. While most state-of-the-art evaluation metrics focus on the sentence level, we emphasize the importance of document structure, showing that lexical cohesion is a critical feature to highlight the superior quality of human translatio...

Most metrics in use for automatic evaluation of machine translation in use equally weigh different matched words in candidate and ref-erence translations, ignoring the fact that each word contributes a different amount of infor-mation to the meaning of a sentence. We ex-periment with ten measures of term informativeness for the purpose of examining...

This paper describes the latest version of the ATEC metric for automatic MT evaluation, with parameters optimized for word choice and word order, the two fundamental features of language that the metric relies on. The former is assessed by matching at various linguistic levels and weighting the informativeness of both matched and unmatched words. T...

We propose a novel metric ATEC for automatic MT evaluation based on explicit assessment of word choice and word order in an MT output in comparison to its reference translation(s), the two most fundamental factors in the construction of meaning for a sentence. The former is assessed by matching word forms at various linguistic levels, including sur...

In this paper we report our recent work on the evaluation of a number of popular automatic evaluation metrics for machine translation using parallel legal texts. The evaluation is carried out, following a recognized evaluation protocol, to assess the reliability, the strengths and weaknesses of these evaluation metrics in terms of their correlation...

The focus of this paper is showing how linguistic information can be modeled in an ontological engineering environment for knowledge management and acquisition, and on this basis made accessible for hierarchical and axiomatic processing. The simplicity of relational network notation models stratal linguistic information solely with reference to set...