Education | UM to use data collection to boost student performance

The University of Macau (UM) presented its plan yesterday to develop its campus in Hengqin into a “Smart Campus,” by making use of mobile data collection and student-teacher interactive tools. The aim is to increase student performance and to transform their creative ideas into business opportunities, the Rector of the University, Yonghua Song, said during the opening ceremony of UM’s “Open Day 2018,” held yesterday morning at the UM Campus.

Ivy Lao, who is from UM’s Information and Communication Technology Office, spoke in greater detail on how the system would create a Smart Campus.

Lao explained that the new system, which would operate through the students’ personal WeChat accounts, can act as interactive tools between the students and the teachers and the different applications can also facilitate guidance within the campus, both on and offline.

The system was tested by an audience that was invited to respond either “Yes or No” to a simple question that popped-up on their phones, and the results were shown immediately on the projection screen.

According to Lao, the system can be used for several purposes such as gathering student responses in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), preparing classes in advance by providing students access to teaching materials, online resources and topics, as well as using mobile phones “after the classes on offline mode for interaction between the students and the teachers so as to clarify doubts and get feedback.”

For the time being, “the system is already in use for the teachers to collect feedback from the students [on] if they have understood the contents of the class” through simple “Yes or No Questionnaires” in order to “monitor their learning process.”

In addition, the same system can be applied to monitor other aspects of campus life, such as energy spending, and can be used to enhance services on the campus as well as for booking sports venues and using other different services.

“In the future we will encourage students to use the app to give feedback to the teacher and [express their] personal opinions. We will also encourage students to write [submit] proposals to the university so we can study what more we can do. We have already collected some proposals for study and we have created the Institute of Collaborative Innovation in order to consolidate all the proposals and study their feasibility,” Lao noted, referencing the institute that was created last year with the purpose on providing support for the development of different projects proposed by the students.

Questioned by the Times on the sidelines of the event, the vice rector for Academic Affairs, Lionel Ni, advanced on the number of projects received saying, “the first batch [of the projects in study] are 24, coming from a total of 45 applications which screen-passed and resulted in the final 24 that have a very good chance to get funded.”

“Some are related to e-Campus or Smart City [but there are also] others related to Chinese [Traditional] Medicine and to Energy Saving. There are many different ideas that show the creativity of the students.”

Ni noted that the ideas need to be able to break the barriers of the University and of Macau, stating that “to make money [these ideas] need to apply to all cities, not just our city, that is too small, what we are doing [internally] is a ‘try out’ to see if it works and if it would be able to be applied to other cities and other places in the world [in order to be profitable].” 

Open day attracts over 10,000 people

THE UNIVERSITY of Macau’s Open Day, which attracted over 10,000 members of the public, according to a statement issued by the university. During the Open Day, different faculties and residential colleges held various activities that were both fun and educational. In addition to booth games and family-friendly games, such as eSports and traditional sports competitions, there was also a parade by international students, an international food festival, and musical performances by university teams on different locations of the campus. Some visitors learned more about the UM campus and UM sudents’ stories through the campus tours, which included different routes and were guided by the PR Student Ambassadors.