Project Background
In a globalised twenty-first century society, the young generation in both Hong Kong and Europe have lots of room to learn about the culture and the lifestyle of each other. There is a strong commonality linking both territories, in that both see the importance of sustainable development, and for secondary school students to broaden their horizons through exchanging ideas and learning from each other.
With an aim at enhancing Hong Kong-Europe relations on the academic front, EuAP realises the need to strengthen direct people-to-people exchange amongst the youth and promote sustainability. Since 2014, the EuAP and the European Studies Programme of the Hong Kong Baptist University have jointly launched this pilot e-learning project on a theme of “Green Living and Sustainability in the Community”.
The third edition of the e-learning project took place over ten weeks between February and April 2017, connecting over 100 students, classes and schools between Hong Kong and the EU, by way of exchanging ideas, and collaborating through research.
Project Themes and Features
In this e-Learning project, students learned about and worked on these four key questions:
1) What is sustainability?
2) How does the EU and Hong Kong support sustainable living?
3) How does your own city/government support sustainable living?
4) What can you do to support sustainable living in your community?
The learning process, via an online learning platform “BlackBoard” and Google Drive, was completed in three stages:
1) Knowledge Gathering: Understanding key concepts and ideas on sustainability
2) Research Tasks: Allowing students to answer the question “How green is my community?”, where the project promoted the importance of sustainable living practices with themes aiming at broadening students’ global vision by encouraging them to look at different practices in Hong Kong and Europe. This phase introduced initiatives to students on green living and sustainability on government and citizen levels, and allowed students to work with each other on environmental issues and evaluate their own communities in terms of sustainability. It also promoted the importance of sustainable living practices on topics of:
a) Plastics & Recycling
b) Fashion: Labour & Toxic Issues
c) City: Urban Life & Green City
d) Food: Production & Consumption
3) Collaborative Group Community Project: a project which took place in the last three weeks of the project, where the students researched and collaborated with their overseas teammates across Hong Kong and Europe. The purpose was to find a common topic where they could work on in attempt to change community behaviour, and this saw the process the students planned, implemented and evaluated their own efforts. The outcome was a blog and a presentation in PowerPoint and video.
You can view the Winning Group Community Projects by clicking on the relevant section on the left hand menu bar.