Awardee of 2025 UGC Teaching Award – Transdisciplinary Innovation Team

Fostering a Transdisciplinary Educational Environment to Nurture Future-shaping Talent

Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) proposed to the University Grants Committee (UGC) and received approval, in November 2021, to launch four transdisciplinary (TD) undergraduate degree programmes during AY2022-2025. Led by Professor William Cheung, Associate Vice-President (Transdisciplinary Education) and Professor of Computer Science, a core Transdisciplinary Planning Team of teaching innovators develops and implements the programmes: Dr. Glos Ho (Director and Principal Lecturer, Division of Transdisciplinary Undergraduate Programmes), Prof. Wendy Huang (Professor, Academy of Wellness and Human Development), Prof. Kingsley Ng (Associate Professor, Academy of Visual Arts), and Prof. Nick Zhang (Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism).

Implementing TD education has ranged from supplemental/co-curricular strategies to framing general education courses. This portfolio highlights the teaching philosophy and collaboration of our team, representing a vision of core institutionalisation beginning with the new programmes: (1) BA (Hons.) in Business Administration (Global Entertainment) (BAGE), (2) BSSc (Hons.) / BSc (Hons.) in Innovation in Health and Social Well-Being (HSWB), (3) BASc (Hons.) in Arts and Technology (ARTT), and (4) Bachelor of Arts, Science, and Technology (Hons.) in Individualised Major (BAScT). HKBU established a university-level division for facilitating cross-faculty teaching and learning, and created a set of signature TD courses, intentionally representing the breadth of the university, and featuring our partnership with students to co-create and apply TD knowledge in societal practice.

The team developed the White Paper of Conceptualisation of Transdisciplinary Education. HKBU’s understanding of TD education is the “transcendental” perspective. Illustrated here, TD education covers the academic fields found in universities and the interaction between academia, industry, and the various sectors that make up our society. TD education also sees the disciplines and the interaction to be evolving dynamically. TD is not just a combination or cross-fertilisation among different disciplines. A new field, including new theories and new inquiry methodologies, will emerge as a result. Approved by the Senate, the White Paper is the guiding principle to develop the second generation of our plan: a new TD undergraduate degree in BASc (Hons.) in Digital Futures and Humanities (DiFH), alongside seven Transdisciplinary Second Majors, which institutionalises TD education at a U-wide level.

HKBU Model of Transdisciplinary Education

Challenges faced by humanity cannot be dealt with by one discipline or sector. We need to adopt an ethos of ‘do whatever it takes’ to tackle them. We acknowledge the simple fact that the world operates as a completely integrated whole, regardless of how finely we have divided it for study in the academy, or for “division of labour” among different sectors. The diagram below features the components of our definition and our plan. Our central tenets are adopting integrative learning (Klein, 2008) as the educational goal and using progressive academic development in degree programmes to provide students enough time/structure and adequate space for self-exploration to achieve this maturity.

We cannot present four full programmes. We illustrate below our integrative approach with examples from each year. Generally, we foster TD learning through academic year courses, using a spiral curriculum in which integrative learning experiences are revisited with increasing depth, as advocated by Bruner (1960).

Year One: First Step To Transdisciplinarity

The 9-unit Global Challenges I/II is HKBU’s flagship TD course, taken by all first-year students in all degree programmes. Recognising that secondary schools are focused on disciplinary approaches, our team designed the course to acknowledge these silos as students transition to university, developing students’ skills as translators of their own experiences as they contemplate solving some of the world’s complex challenges, as represented in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Our framework consists of three pedagogical stages: “Connection”, “Complexity”, and “Collaboration”, derived from the Knowledge-Attitude-Behaviour (KAB) framework, which posits that knowledge shapes attitudes, which in turn influence behaviours.

Connection: to make interdisciplinary connections, synthesize ideas and perspectives. Students from different backgrounds investigated sustainable clothing (SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production). They carried out ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in fashion boutiques followed by four fieldwork projects in Hong Kong and Macau. They interviewed 12 faculty members from different disciplines, integrating these insights to co-create innovative concepts, and produced 22 innovative educational resources for secondary schools.

Complexity: engaging with stakeholders and community sectors to enhance TD understanding of global challenges and broaden their perspectives. Exploring SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) and SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being), our students collaborated with the local charity Breadline, gaining firsthand experience in collecting and redistributing bread to those in need. They had virtual dialogues with international peers to comprehend global canteen structures and led innovative food-making workshops for local high school students. Students integrated their insights into 22 visual presentations on sustainable transcultural eating, which were displayed as posters in campus canteens for six months.

Collaboration: Integrative learning includes adapting/applying skills acquired in one situation to new ones. Students explored city structures in Hong Kong and developed a sustainable guidebook using ethnographic field visits across 18 districts (SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities). The students then spent three days in Zhuhai, collaborating with peers from our Zhuhai campus (Beijing Normal-Hong Kong Baptist University). They shared insights about regional differences and co-produced 22 videos promoting cross-border urban sustainability. Guidebooks were displayed in Central Market and featured on World Wildlife Fund-Hong Kong (WWF-Hong Kong)’s website. The videos were showcased on campus and are being used as teaching materials for future cohorts.

In “GreenWash”, a student team designed an interactive card-game to help consumers make informed choices. The team received support from the HKBU Social Innovation Kick-Start Fund. Together with three other groups, the students were invited by WWF-Hong Kong to showcase their projects in the 2024 Sustainable Living Festival.

The Year 1 project “COLOURS” was featured at Hong Kong InnoCarnival 2023. Students utilised sensors and digital tools to create interactive experiences; the art installation offered visitors a unique opportunity to explore the power of colours through the lens of technology.

Year Two/Three: Transdisciplinarity Innovation

Students connect ideas and transfer concepts and/or practices to new, complex situations within and beyond campus. Two pairs of courses illustrate our design.

Year 2 Health Innovation and Well-being students take two experiential learning courses, AI and Data Analytics for Health and Social Innovation I/II, in which they apply these technologies to problems of health and social well-being. Semester 1: students visited an elderly centre, observing patients with dementia and their caretakers. Semester 2: students developed seven smart solutions to address mental health, exercise, and sleep problems for these populations through a pedagogical focus on problem-solving, perspective-taking, and collaboration. Their work was showcased in the Transdisciplinary Discovery Learning Commons in 2024.

A flagship project was Med*nap, a single-lead ECG sleep monitor and facilitator that uses a supervised learning approach to automatically classify the user’s sleep stages based on their ECG signal. The project was showcased at the HKBU Principals’ Day 2025 and received the HKBU Social Innovation Kick-Start Fund to track sleep quality and give users personalised advice.

In “AI Moodcheck” adopts AI to understand emotions through facial expression and recommend music that suits the mood of the moment was invited to Po Leung Kuk Ho Yuk Ching (1984) College in 2024.

Partnering with Caritas Hong Kong, Year 3 students in Arts and Technology and Global Entertainment Business take Transdisciplinary Collaboration Studios I/II. Under the theme “Meaningful Play!” they created interactive artwork for children, utilising technology to craft fun games and immersive experiences that stimulate the senses and convey important messages about dreams, career choices, and mental health.

Between the two semesters in 2024, our students visited Bangkok, Thailand, to team with 20 Thai university students organised by the School of Changemakers (SoC) and the Bangkok Art Biennale, focusing on SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-being). The students collaborated on an exhibition on using art as an effective tool for driving social change. The plight of abandoned pets was highlighted in one interactive exhibit in which motion sensors triggered animal sounds to emerge from innocuous trash heaps. The exhibition was held in 2025 at The Jockey Club Campus of Creativity.

Year Four: Transdisciplinarity Honors Project

As students enter their final year, they, like many of their colleagues, undertake independent research or social innovation projects and contribute original insights to their fields. In our programme, the thinking for this project is structured into the curriculum starting in Year One, as they define, explore, and refine the questions on which they wish to work.

Our concept of TD Education as a full curricular option does not end with courses and some degree options. We are continuing to develop and implement new options to increase participation

Individualised Major, the most flexible form of TD education at HKBU. The Bachelor of Arts, Science, and Technology (Hons) in Individualised Major, launched in 2022, is the first JUPAS-admitted undergraduate programme of this kind in Hong Kong. Under the guidance of HKBU academic staff and community advisors, students who are interested but do not fit inside traditional majors can design their own, tailored to their specific academic interests and career aspirations. These students work closely with Academic Supervisors (23 HKBU faculty members) and 20 Community Advisors.

A U-Wide Transdisciplinary Second Major enables students the mix & match option. In the Planning Exercise Proposal 2025-28, HKBU proposed seven Transdisciplinary Second Majors and two Second Majors, encouraging students to follow personal interests and be better prepared for the future via combining different curricular components, majors, and second majors.

Inspired by Littrell (2020), our team and other collaborators developed a bilingual board game designed to simulate real-world scenarios related to the 17 SDGs. The game will be embedded in a new core course, “Transdisciplinary Inquires and Methodologies,” offered to students taking the Transdisciplinary Second Major.

In the Global Transdisciplinary Students-as-Partners Integration Tour, students co-create educational resources. Our team developed a Global Transdisciplinary Integration Tour Series for our students to encounter SDG issues beyond Hong Kong. Our goal: students co-design the curriculum, co-create learning resources, and teach. Collaborating with six overseas university partners and three NGOs, our students examined global problems firsthand and co-created teaching materials with faculty members. In our 2024 trip to Sydney, 14 HKBU TD students explored environmental issues as citizen scientists. Supported by Western Sydney University (WSU) and aligned with SDG 14 (Life Below Water), students traversed the South Creek and learned about microplastics, riparian health, water bugs, and flooding.

With the ECF-funded Platform for Student-generated Learning Resources, students can share educational resources with the wider community. With the support of the Environment and Conservation Fund (ECF) and WWF-Hong Kong, we provide an innovative digital platform, the “Hong Kong TransLearn Bazaar”.

HKBU hosted the first Transdisciplinary Student Conference in 2025, offering a platform for students to present their ideas for tackling complex challenges. For instance, Ella Yu is developing a personality trait scale to assess the suitability of AI companions in addressing loneliness.

We are partnering with the HKBU Library to launch the first student-led journal in TD, giving students a voice in academic and research communities.

Lesson Learned and Continuous Development

We have actively and consistently embraced collaborative input as we create our emergent definition of TD education. We used our White Paper to stimulate conversations at faculty, staff, and student events, and held an on-campus Community of Practice to challenge participants to think beyond their boundaries.

Outside HKBU, we have shared our vision and listened to the conversations at over 10 universities and international forums. We have introduced TD education to secondary school teachers and students. HKBU is hosting the inaugural Pacific Asia Summit on Transdisciplinary Education (PASTE) in June 2025.

Curriculum optimisation based on feedback from academic staff and students is especially important. Feedback indicates that more room between TD signature courses could allow students more time to integrate learning experiences.

Academic advising is critical for TD education as more flexible and personalised learning pathways call for better guidance. An online/AI system supports each student’s individual learning pathway, facilitating continuous reflection and informed adaptation.

A Last Word

For us, TD education is not a veneer that overlays the standard curriculum as a special topic of interest, a redefinition of something we were doing already, or co-curricular option.

We have created degree programmes and options in which “training in the field” is the beginning, and not the end, of an education that prepares students to see global challenges as integrated, multidimensional problems. Learning, as well as assessment, is contextualised where the challenges occur in the real world.

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EVIDENCE: THE IMPACT ON STUDENTS’ LEARNING OUTCOMES

We adopted the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) VALUE Rubrics on Integrative Learning, which includes five dimensions: i) “Connections to disciplines”, ii) “Connections to experience”, iii) “Transfer”, iv) “Integrated Communication”, and v) “Reflection and Self-Assessment”.

Overall, we identified four periods during Years 1-3 (6 semesters) where students engaged in a 2-to-3-step progression of projects in TD courses (e.g., Global Challenges), and applied the same evaluation criteria to 104 student artefacts from the projects. If the 5 Integrative Learning scales are collapsed to a single value for each of the four progression periods, we have two intriguing observations: (1) each of the linked project sets shows improvement in Integrative Learning, and (2) the general trend over Years 1-3 shows a satisfyingly positive trajectory, from novice/apprentice to apprentice/proficient. Wickson and Carew (2014) advocate using spider charts to visualise and compare performance when multiple scales are used and for tracking progression over time. Two raters assessed the student’s work.

Discussion: Inasmuch as there is yet a consensus for defining TD Education, higher education programmes need to create tentative markers for assessing their learning outcomes. In our introduction, we explicitly adopted Integrative Learning as our foundational definition: the co-production process with students by integrating knowledge from diverse disciplines and sectors, fostering innovation beyond traditional boundaries in a progressive manner, and encouraging interaction between academic knowledge and other sectors of society to address societally relevant problems. We hypothesised that integrative learning skills would improve progressively, as a student’s competency, and that we should focus on this skill as a longitudinal measure across the TD core courses rather than waiting for a global, summative, and speculative definition of TD education.

Another scale in the Integrative Learning rubric is social responsibility and civic engagement. We conducted focus groups with students in the Global Challenges course and Global Integration Tour, along with a content analysis from 1,215 reflection papers collected from 135 students during AY2023/24. The analytical results align with the Integrative Learning rubrics, featuring emphasis on interconnectedness of disciplines and SDGs (Connections to Discipline), ownership of learning (Connections to Experience), TD collaboration (Transfer) and (Integrated Communication), and self-growth/global citizenship (Self-Reflection) as emergent themes.

“Understanding these [SDG] goals was like opening a window to a new world where each discipline contributes to sustainability. This approach went beyond theoretical exploration, and it effectively helped solve real-world problems.” – HKBU student

“I have learned not to underestimate my power; I can also be the one who inspires others.” – HKBU student

Although we are still a year away from graduating the first class of students from the TD degree programmes, our initial results on their progress are promisingly consistent with our hypothesis, and not only show evidence to claim an increase in integrative learning, but also some useful pointers for improving our programme design.

EVIDENCE: PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

The team has been gathering inspiration and feedback from exemplary scholars across Europe, Asia, the US, and Australia. In the early stages, Prof. Toru Ishida (Waseda University) shared insights on designing a TD curriculum for first- and second-year undergraduate students. Prof. Louise McWhinnie, Emeritus Professor and inaugural Dean of the Faculty of Transdisciplinary Innovation at the University of Technology Sydney, spent a month at HKBU in 2023 where she shared her experiences in running Australia’s first university TD degree and met with the team and other HKBU colleagues regularly to discuss observations and feedback for improvement. Prof. Brian Coppola (University of Michigan) shared his insights at a roundtable discussion on TD teaching from a US perspective, and Prof. Eva Bendix Peterson from Roskilde University, Denmark, discussed the adoption of inquiry-based learning in an interdisciplinary setting in higher education in Northern Europe.

While intra-team development is crucial for the smooth implementation of TD education at HKBU, the team’s composition across various faculties and schools is equally vital to ensure mutual learning, understanding, and communication. The governance structure of TD education at HKBU requires team members to serve on critical committees, such as Programme Management, Transdisciplinary Undergraduate Programmes Board, and Assessment, where the latest programme developments, cross-faculty collaborations, quality assurance, and student assessment and performance in each TD programme are discussed.

With individual professional development in their respective disciplines, as detailed in their CVs, each team member brings unique disciplinary expertise and programme management experience. This diversity sparks pedagogical innovation through varied thinking approaches and teaching styles. For example, when the team co-designed and co-taught the Global Challenges course and led the Global Integration Tour, the diverse expertise enriched students’ learning. This collaboration also extends to the team’s involvement in running and judging annual secondary school contests.

In 2024, the team developed a White Paper on the Conceptualisation of Transdisciplinary Education, providing a framework for developing and implementing TD teaching and learning at HKBU. This not only benefited the team but also introduced a definition for TD education and its guiding principles within HKBU’s context during the Faculty Development Day. It was further shared with the School of Continuing Education during their Staff Development Day and with Beijing Normal-Hong Kong Baptist University at their AI-Integrated Curriculum Reform Task Force.

 Beyond the HKBU campus, the concept of TD education was shared with department heads and research leaders at prestigious institutions.

A Community of Practice (CoP) named TransdiscipliLink was established in 2024 to promote TD collaboration in Hong Kong. This community initiated bi-weekly “TransColLab Luncheons”, facilitating small group discussions. To date, these luncheons have covered topics such as integrating mathematics into songwriting, utilising AI for mental health, and applying visual arts to medical equipment, sparking students’ creativity and encouraging them to think beyond disciplinary boundaries.

 Professor William Cheung delivered the keynote “Dance with the Digital Futures via Transdisciplinarity” at international forums such as the HKBU International Symposium on Humanities, Societies, and Digital Futures (2025), where Dr. Glos Ho served as the moderator, the Student Empowerment Forum at the Learning & Teaching Expo (2024), and the Innovation Forum for World College Students at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (2024), reaching over 100 international participants.

 The Global Challenges course was shortlisted for the QS Reimagined Education Awards in Sustainability Literacy (2024). Dr. Glos Ho shared the teaching pedagogy with over 80 international participants in London in 2024. The progressive student-centred framework was also presented at the Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching Conference in 2025, hosted by the London School of Economics. These teaching practices were also presented to 40 RPg students at HKBU, inspiring them to integrate TD education into their early careers.

In addition to 50 media articles featuring interviews with TD students, students presented at conferences and symposia.

To extend university education beyond tertiary levels, the concept of TD education was introduced to secondary school teachers and students. Supported by the HKSAR Education Bureau’s Business-School Partnership Programme (BSPP), the annual Transdisciplinary Contest for Hong Kong Secondary Schools was organised, attracting over 100 teams and more than 500 secondary school students over two years (2023-24). This initiative provided a platform for secondary students to develop a TD mindset, fostering innovative problem-solving skills and preparing them to be future-ready leaders.

We are excited to note that HKBU will host the inaugural 2025 Pacific Asia Summit on Transdisciplinary Education (PASTE) in June 2025, bringing together TD colleagues from Japan, India, Korea, Singapore, and Australia to exchange ideas, share best practices, and explore collaboration on innovative TD teaching and learning strategies. The Summit will be integrated into the secondary school teachers’ workshop as part of the Transdisciplinary Secondary School Contest. At the end of the presentations, secondary school teachers will share their initiatives in their respective schools and co-create teaching and learning ideas with the speakers and BU students.

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