Learning at The School of Business
The 21st century calls for a new type of global citizens, able to effortlessly apply a wide range of skills in ethical manners while also taking into account the impact of decisions and actions on the wellbeing of others and on the environment.
Consistent with these challenges HKBU has adapted the principle of “whole person education” as its underlying educational philosophy. The implementation of this principle requires an approach that supports a student’s ability to go beyond academic excellence. Classroom-based learning is supported by practical internship, service learning, international exchange and skills-development workshop.
By using “Outcomes-Based Teaching & Learning”, or OBTL, as our pedagogical approach, we aim at imparting our students with a specific set of skills and attributes that will accompany our graduates throughout their lives.
General Education
Under the new 4-year undergraduate degree structure, students entering HKBU from 2012 are required to take a suite of GE courses in order to complete a multi-disciplinary learning experience. To foster the intended learning outcomes of the GE program, students need to complete 38 units qualified as GE. The GE requirements are divided into 2 categories, namely:
- Core requirements: University English, University Chinese, Public Speaking, Information management Technology, Numeracy, Physical Education, History & Civilization, Values & The Meaning of Life, and University Life; and
- Distribution requirements: Arts, Business, Communication/Visual Arts, Science/Chinese Medicine, Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary
The Core Requirements will equip students with the transferable skills, attitudes and values that will enable them to lead a balanced lives both during and following their university education. The distribution requirements will serve to broaden the scope of students’ learning by having them pursue areas of knowledge outside of their major discipline.
The General Education courses aim to enhance students’ understanding of the role of business and management principles in shaping contemporary human experience.
We hope that these courses will also continue to attract students from other schools so that their general appreciation of the business reality is enhanced through this shared knowledge experience.
Outcome-Based Teaching & Learning (OBTL)
OBTL is focused on ensuring that our graduates acquire a specified set of skills and attributes, or Intended Learning Outcomes (ILO), identified by Baptist as fundamental to our “whole person education” principle. These ILOs are citizenship, skills, creativity, knowledge, learning, ethics, teamwork and communication.
The ILOs essentially determine the content of our curriculum, our teaching methods, and the assessment process we use to ensure that our graduates meet our exacting standards. The ILOs also provide a framework for curriculum evaluation.
At the macro level, this entails that courses’ ILOs constructively integrate programs’ ILOs. At the micro level, a student will be made fully aware of the ILOs specific to a course, and can expect that the Teaching & Learning Activities and the Assessment Methods are designed to assist them achieving these ILOs.
Assessment is an integral part of learning and teaching. We use Criterion-reference assessment (CRA), a main tenet of OBTL, as our standard for assessment. CRA is the process of evaluating and grading the learning of students with preset criteria used as benchmarks to measure the ability of a student to reach a particular standard, thus certifying the reliability and validity of students’ achievements.
Rubrics, essentially a table or a matrix matching criteria and descriptors to a grading scale, set expectations for student performance by clearly defining and communicating the standards of learning expected for any specific activity.
The recent development to incorporate General Education (GE) as part of the business school curriculum further ensures that our students extend the reach of their knowledge by following courses specifically tailored to incorporate elements of various academic disciplines. These GE courses are crafted carefully, and subject to stringent quality requirements to ensure that the learning standards remain constant throughout the curriculum.
