Over the past two decades, Chinese universities have been promoting the reform of general education, and have developed an educational mode combining both general and professional education. By reviewing and reflecting on the educational reform process of Chinese universities, we attempt to reveal its inner logic and inevitability. The reform of undergraduate education in Chinese universities has a long way to go, and we hope that this reflection and understanding will enable us to develop a clear vision for the future of educational reform.

Retention and graduation continue to be topics of discussion for online doctoral programs within academia. Focusing on the post-coursework, dissertation proposal stage, this study examines whether students progress differently with two different mentoring approaches: the innovative structured-seminars versus the traditional unstructured mentoring. This study, using a quantitative approach and an extant data of 116 doctoral students, measures students' progression by the number of years enrolled in the program and number of credit hours earned while engaged with the two different mentorings. The results indicate that students engaged in the new structured-seminars on average spent significantly less time and needed significantly fewer credits than their peers in the unstructured mentoring. The innovative structured-seminar approach shows potential as an effective curriculum for online doctoral programs.

This study investigated the utilization of various types of Moodle course materials (including resources and activities) by 190 Chinese students from five classes of an English-medium instruction (EMI) course, their views regarding the utilization, and their academic achievements. It aimed at finding out the types of Moodle course materials positively associated with students' learning achievements, and identifying the specific features and practices with the course materials that might contribute to the learning effectiveness. Data were collected from an in-class survey, focus group interviews, and retrieval of Moodle activity logs and grade reports. Of the types of Moodle course materials that were found to have students' access frequencies significantly correlated with their course total scores, comments from focus-group data that were related to the effective utilization were analysed using an inductive approach. Then the emergent themes were mapped on to the headings ''appropriate resources and tools," "integrative multimodal tasks," and "sustainability beliefs and practices" for establishing guiding principles for designing blended-learning content courses for second/foreign language learners. This article suggests that EMI course instructors consider offering learning scaffolding through various means and providing supports when students are interacting with the learning management system, in particular when they are dealing with assessments.

Most literature regarding involvement of retired adults in the classroom focuses on feasibility rather than benefits directly perceived by individuals, let alone the lack of research on academic learning purposes. This report presents the pilot action of an intergenerational (IG) approach/program, within which a retired professional crossed the border (i.e., from Hong Kong to Chinese mainland) and engaged a class of ESL (English as a second language) undergraduate learners — as an auditor — in a credit-bearing course. The program was staged through intergenerational programming in terms of purposeful planning and activity design to facilitate contacts between young and old. Post-program responses to Likert-based scales and open-ended questions were employed to examine what perceived benefits across generations could be found after program implementation, thereby examining the value of intergenerational learning through the pilot action. Evaluation findings indicated that the value of intergenerational learning can be conceptualized as a pathway leading to benefits perceivable across generations and the significance of academic learning purposes valued by young and old. Despite benefits found, the auditor approach is arguably a way of working due to lessons learned. Further studies should investigate how an auditor system like the program could contribute to the goal of promoting impactful results in other course settings. Explicit appreciation of the retired citizen's involved is also documented as a concluding note.

Outcome-based education (OBE) has permeated the education systems globally and has been upheld by the Washington Accord for accreditation of undergraduate engineering programs. Its implementation has extended beyond engineering to many other programs. This study adopted a reflective approach in comparing the specific cases of OBE practices of an undergraduate engineering program and a science program in two different countries based on recollection of involvement in the OBE practices. The reflected aspects covered the alignment of outcomes, the design of assessments, teaching and learning process, and measurement of outcomes. The reflection shows that the engineering program has a more formalized and prescriptive approach to OBE than the science program and there is greater emphasis on quantitatively determining the attainment of program and course outcomes. The science program, however, has a more flexible structure of OBE and more diverse channels of gathering data for outcomes attainment. It is deemed that a structured OBE that confers greater flexibility in accommodating different learning needs and gauging of achievement would be helpful to the OBE practices of both programs. OBE, as an educational theory, needs to be internalized by educators to optimize its impacts. It should ideally move on from the showcase of outcomes and numbers which may at times, compromise educational quality.

Based on the case study of the pedagogical practices of the School of Communication of Hong Kong Baptist University, this paper scrutinizes how teaching of media and communication keeps pace with the rapid changes of the media industry and social realities under the impact of technological advancement, and in particular artificial intelligence. From the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, we analyse the transformations and evolutions in media and communication education during the three stages of the development of the School, starting from balancing 'Skills' and 'Principles', namely the struggles between practice-driven teaching and theory-based teaching, to the paradigm shift with the dominance of new knowledge and curriculum design that creates synergy of teaching and technology. Apart from theoretical and practical implications on media and communication education, the study suggests a new balance in the new paradigm.