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Background: The context of learning, which includes the host country, is an important variable of service-learning. Since international service-learning programs often take place in developing countries, studies about their impact and outcomes commonly draw from experiences in developing countries. Purpose: We investigate service-learning experience in developed, urban settings focusing on dissonances and civic outcomes, key areas of service-learning pedagogy. Methodology/Approach: This an instrumental case study based on a small group sample of 12 Asian student participants of a service-learning exchange to partner universities in the USA. Findings/Conclusions: Findings suggest that developed cities can be fertile grounds for impactful dissonances and civic learning. “First-world expectations” increased or intensified dissonances students experienced. Confronting urban poverty and other social issues in cities similar to their own led students to see domestic problems with fresh eyes. Implications: Service-learning exchange in developed cities can facilitate understanding social problems particularly in the way these occur in developed countries and promises transferability of learning. However, students need prompting to connect experiences overseas to home contexts and draw practical consequences. Faculty or staff assistance is necessary to help students constructively cope with powerful dissonances.

This paper reports the results of an action research project on improving students’ learning from international service-learning. Participants were two consecutive cohorts of university students en...

Background: Educators have divided and often strongly held views on whether service-learning should be required of all students. However, studies examining students’ view on mandatory service-learning are limited in the literature. Purpose: This article contrasts and examines students’ views toward a service-learning requirement at a Hong Kong university before and after attending a mandatory service-learning course, and any resulting changes. Methodology/Approach: This is a retrospective qualitative study using semistructured interviews. Participants were 49 students who completed a service-learning course in the 2013–2014 academic year. They were selected according to the nature of their performance in their completed course. Findings/Conclusions: Results show that students’ perspectives toward service-learning are not static but rather change dramatically as a result of their experiences. Most students, even those who recalled being initially negative or resigned, reported positive views toward service-learning after completing the course. Implications: Students’ initial resistance alone is not a reason for making service-learning optional. Some students have a negative view due to a lack of information or misinformation. Making it compulsory gives these students an opportunity to decide for themselves based on true experience, which, if implemented effectively, has the potential of nurturing initially hostile or inert students into more civic-minded citizens.

International service-learning (ISL) is conceptualized as an intersection of three educational components: service-learning, study abroad, and international education. Its potential benefits include increases in students’ intercultural competence and sense of global citizenship. Arguably, through immersion in a cross-cultural context, students can learn to appreciate diverse values and cultures while enhancing their social responsibility and bringing benefit to a community in need. However, most existing empirical studies of the impact of ISL utilize small samples drawn from a single program, which restricts the generalizability of the findings. This study, using a large sample from multiple courses, aims to bridge the gap by examining the relationship between an ISL experience and university students’ global citizenship and intercultural effectiveness. The findings suggest that skills such as intercultural effectiveness and global competencies are more easily enhanced than attitudinal values such as social responsibility and global civic engagement. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.

Guided by the expectancy-value theory of motivation in learning, we explored the causal relationship between students’ learning experiences, motivation, and cognitive learning outcome in academic service-learning. Based on a sample of 2,056 college students from a university in Hong Kong, the findings affirm that learning experiences and motivation are key factors determining cognitive learning outcome, affording a better understanding of student learning behavior and the impact in service-learning. This research provides an insight into the impact of motivation and learning experiences on students’ cognitive learning outcome while engaging in academic service-learning. This not only can discover the intermediate factors of the learning process but also provides insights to educators on how to enhance their teaching pedagogy.

The growth of age-friendly community initiatives underscores a paradigmatic shift from the individual to the community, addressing dynamic transactions between people and the environment they are living in. The purpose of the present study is to address the gap in existing research by examining the psycho-social effects of the sense of community in mediating between WHO domains of age-friendliness and the life satisfaction of older adults. Data were obtained from 898 participants in Hong Kong. Path analysis was conducted. Two AFC domains, Social Participation as well as Community Support and Health Services, were found to be associated with life satisfaction. Sense of community was found to mediate between these two domains and life satisfaction. The implications of these findings are discussed with reference to developing opportunities in social participation of older adults and enhancing community/health support services in the context of developing sustainability in the community.

At many universities, there is a growing realization that the university owes a social responsibility to the community. Society invests in its citizens through the university, and the university empowers its students to realize their potential, both as competent professionals and as responsible citizens. This requires the cultivation of attributes such as social awareness, ethical leadership, and social responsibility, which are generally recognized as being difficult to teach in a classroom setting. Service learning is a form of active learning that integrates meaningful service to the community with academic study and reflective learning. In service learning, the learning goals of the students are as important as the benefits of the service that is rendered to the community; in addition, the two are interlinked and mutually reinforcing. Research has shown that service learning contributes positively to the attainment of many of the aforementioned desired graduate attributes for university students. However, there is much controversy about whether service learning should be mandated. There is a need to examine whether and to what extent students’ learning and development from completing a mandatory service learning subject are influenced by their initial inclination. Data described in this article were collected from 756 students via an online post-experience survey. Results show that students’ total learning experience from service learning had a much stronger impact on their learning and development than their initial inclination or even interest in the subject.

Purpose Social signal processing under affective computing aims at recognizing and extracting useful human social interaction patterns. Fight is a common social interaction in real life. A fight detection system finds wide applications. This paper aims to detect fights in a natural and low-cost manner. Design/methodology/approach Research works on fight detection are often based on visual features, demanding substantive computation and good video quality. In this paper, the authors propose an approach to detect fight events through motion analysis. Most existing works evaluated their algorithms on public data sets manifesting simulated fights, where the fights are acted out by actors. To evaluate real fights, the authors collected videos involving real fights to form a data set. Based on the two types of data sets, the authors evaluated the performance of their motion signal analysis algorithm, which was then compared with the state-of-the-art approach based on MoSIFT descriptors with Bag-of-Words mechanism, and basic motion signal analysis with Bag-of-Words. Findings The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach accurately detects fights in real scenarios and performs better than the MoSIFT approach. Originality/value By collecting and annotating real surveillance videos containing real fight events and augmenting with well-known data sets, the authors proposed, implemented and evaluated a low computation approach, comparing it with the state-of-the-art approach. The authors uncovered some fundamental differences between real and simulated fights and initiated a new study in discriminating real against simulated fight events, with very good performance.

This paper describes a strategy to build community capacity to address the challenge of SDG#7 (Affordable and Clean Energy) through an international student service-learning programme. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University partnered with an NGO in Rwanda in a four-year collaborative effort to electrify a semi-rural village in Rwanda with solar power. For sustainability, we developed a three-tier capacity building model that combined efforts from university students (who provide the technical expertise), strengths and expertise of a partnering local NGO (who had previously developed a community support infrastructure in the form of strong self-help groups), and community commitment and support (who provide the manpower initially and subsequently acquired the technical capacity).

Affective computing has recently become an important area in human-computer interaction research. Techniques have been developed to enable computers to understand human affects or emotions, in order to predict human intention more precisely and provide better service to user to enhance user experience. In this paper, we investigate into the detection of human attention level as a useful from of human affect, which could be influential in intelligent e-learning applications. We adopt ubiquitous hardware available in most computer systems, namely, webcam and mouse. Information from multiple input modalities is fused together for effective human attention detection. We invite human subjects to carry out experiments in reading articles when being imposed upon different kinds of distraction to induce them into different levels of attention. Machine-learning techniques are applied to identify useful features to recognize human attention level by building up user-independent models. Our result indicate performance improvement with multimodal inputs from webcam and mouse over that of a single device. We believe that our work has revealed and intersting affective computing direction with potential application in e-learning.

This paper presents Personalized Affect Detection with Minimal Annotation (PADMA), a user-dependent approach for identifying affective states from spontaneous facial expressions without the need for expert annotation. The conventional approach relies on the use of key frames in recorded affect sequences and requires an expert observer to identify and annotate the frames. It is susceptible to user variability and accommodating individual differences is difficult. The alternative is a user-dependent approach, but it would be prohibitively expensive to collect and annotate data for each user. PADMA uses a novel Association-based Multiple Instance Learning (AMIL) method, which learns a personal facial affect model through expression frequency analysis, and does not need expert input or frame-based annotation. PADMA involves a training/calibration phase in which the user watches short video segments and reports the affect that best describes his/her overall feeling throughout the segment. The most indicative facial gestures are identified and extracted from the facial response video, and the association between gesture and affect labels is determined by the distribution of the gesture over all reported affects. Hence both the geometric deformation and distribution of key facial gestures are specially adapted for each user. We show results that demonstrate the feasibility, effectiveness and extensibility of our approach.

Human-centered computing is rapidly becoming a major research direction as new developments in sensor technology make it increasingly feasible to obtain signals from human beings. At the same time, the pervasiveness of computing devices is also encouraging more research in human---computer interaction, especially in the direction of personalized and adaptive user interfaces. Among the various research issues, affective computing, or the ability of computers to understand and react according to what a user "feels," has been gaining in importance. In order to recognize the human affect (feeling), computers rely on the analysis of signal inputs captured by a multitude of means. This paper proposes the use of human physiological signals as a new form of modality in determining human affects, in a non-intrusive manner. The principle of non-invasiveness is very important, since it imposes no extra burden on the user, which improves user accessibility and encourages user adoption. This goal is realized via the physiological mouse, as a first step toward the support of affective computing. The conventional mouse is converted with a small optical component for capturing user photoplethysmographic (PPG) signal. With the PPG signal, it is possible to compute and derive human physiological signals. A prototype of the physiological mouse was built and raw PPG readings measured. The accuracy of the approach was evaluated through empirical studies to determine human physiological signals from the mouse PPG data. Finally, pilot experiments to correlate human physiological signals with various modes of human---computer interaction, namely gaming and video watching, were conducted. The trend in physiological signals could be used as feedback to the computer system which in turn adapts to the needs or the mood of the user, for instance change the volume and the light intensity when watching a video or playing a game based on current user emotion. The authors argue that this research will provide a new dimension for multimodal affective computing research, and the pilot study has already shed some light toward this research goal.

The trend towards a globalized and knowledge-based society is one of the development hallmarks of the twenty-first century, and there have been numerous education reforms in response to this trend. Engineering education is no exception. Traditionally, engineering education places heavy emphasis on technical aspects, such as mathematical and scientific fundamentals. This heavy focus on the theory and technical aspects often hinders other professions from understanding the world of engineering. As a result, the general public often views engineering as a field that is isolated and difficult to comprehend, which also limits the development of engineering (Morris et al. in Eur J Eng Educ 32(2):135–142, 2007). However, it has become increasingly difficult to perform professionally in this evolving global environment within traditional curricular (National Academy of Engineering in The engineer of 2020: Visions of engineering in the new century. National Academies Press, Washington, DC, 2004). The National Academy of Engineering forecasts that, in 2020, engineers not only need to be technically competent, but also be trained in other ‘soft skills’, such as civic responsibility, intercultural competence, leadership, communication and management, for them to be able to contribute to society (Galloway in Civ Eng Mag Arch 77(11):46–104, 2007). In this chapter, we present an engineering service-learning subject that was designed to incorporate major and non-major students. This multidisciplinary subject, which incorporates an international service-learning project, aims to provide a holistic learning experience that raises the problem-solving skills and general knowledge for all students, in particular, to teach students about the impact of engineering on society, and human and societal factors in engineering. Course design, challenges that we encountered, impacts on major and non-major students, and the limitations of this multidisciplinary approach will be discussed.

Our university faced a number of obstacles in the implementation of service-learning: the lack of experience in academic service-learning, the lack of a public service culture, and the perceived lack of appropriate recognition for good teaching. To tackle these obstacles, we designed carefully a financial and workload model to address the issues of motivation and recognition. We also set up an Office of Service-Learning to provide comprehensive operational support and staff development. These include the use of eLearning in blended learning environments. It includes workshops on all aspects such as subject development, project development, assessment, offshore project development, and perhaps most effectively, practical experiential learning. We aggressively develop our own research program on critical aspects of service-learning scholarship. We are also experimenting with innovative pedagogies such as an offshore base in Cambodia as a platform for international collaboration in service-learning.

At PolyU, we instituted service-learning as an effective experiential pedagogy to nurture social responsibility which is also strongly related to youth leadership, leading ultimately to improvements in the quality of life of the students themselves, as well as the communities that they serve. While designing an effective program to integrate service-learning into our undergraduate academic programs, we aim to address the well-known motivational needs of human behavior: autonomy, competence, and relatedness, as well as the desirable qualities of leadership and global outlook. We have also taken into consideration the specific cultural characteristics of higher education in Hong Kong. The result is an academic service-learning program which is compulsory yet includes a wide selection of subjects, structured instructions balanced with student-based learning, challenging as well as meaningful service projects, and a growing set of boundary-crossing, international projects in far away radically different cultures. This chapter discusses the design of the program in some details.

We found that students generally perceived that they learned quite a lot from service-learning. Learning gains are strongly correlated to the student’s interest and the learning experience, while the correlations to the student’s grade and whether they took service-learning primarily to fulfil the requirement are weak. It can be considered an encouraging affirmation of the decision to make service-learning compulsory. On the other hand, some students found the physical hardship tougher than expected. Some also have difficulties when the realities in the field were different from their expectations, when their preparations were inadequate, etc. Cultural and other factors seem to pose interesting challenges different from what is commonly presented in literature. Some lessons may be relevant to global adoption of service-learning as an educational pedagogy.

Service-learning has been proven to be a high-impact educational pedagogy in many disciplines. It addresses human, and community needs through engaging in community activities. With professional engineering expertise, integrating engineering into service-learning not only can make particularly impactful community service, especially in developing countries where engineering expertise is not always available but also provides an effective way for students to apply their theoretical knowledge to solve real-world problems. Service-learning in engineering has been documented in the last 20 years, and it was implemented as extracurricular activities followed by integrating into core curriculums. However, most of the programs are only offer to the engineering students and less consider implementing as a form of general education with applying multidisciplinary approach. This research examines how to integrate students from very different disciplines into the same project. Our case study is a credit-bearing service-learning subject offered by the Department of Computing which is open to all undergraduate students and the projects were conducted in Rwanda and Cambodia in 2015 and 2016.