Case Study of Good T&L Practices > List of Case Studies > Mr. David L. Bishop
Biography
Mr. Bishop is a Principal Lecturer at the University of Hong Kong and the International MBA Program at Fudan University, Shanghai. He has broad legal experience in the United States and across Asia, particularly China. Mr. Bishop has worked on major real estate, private equity, financing, and M&A deals, and participated in numerous negotiations in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. He has also acted as outside counsel in connection with various corporate, technology, life sciences and commercial matters for MNCs operating in Asia.
In addition to a robust private legal experience, Mr. Bishop focuses significant time on activities and programs providing direct benefit to the community. He consults companies about their ethics, CSR, pro bono, and social entrepreneurship initiatives, and is founder and director of multiple non-profit companies. He and his students are constantly looking for commercial solutions to complex societal problems.
Mr. Bishop adopts a multicultural approach to teaching, aiming to broaden the students’ perspectives and help them to apply complex analysis to real-world legal, ethical, and business problems.
The world has changed significantly over the past decades, and due to factors like COVID and the rapid development of important technologies even more changes are ahead. It has been estimated that 38% of current jobs in developed economies are at risk of being made redundant in the next 15 years. These coming changes can usher in either utopian or dystopian futures, and I believe institutions like HKU have an obligation to help ensure we develop leaders who drive us toward optimal outcomes.
But is our current system of higher education prepared to develop these leaders? While many are concerned that human workers will be replaced by robots, in some ways we still teach students to think like machines. We often focus our teaching and assessment on simple knowledge comprehension and retention. This is understandable – it is more comfortable if there is a “right” answer, and comprehension and retention are easier to assess than critical thinking. But these are also areas where machines will always outperform humans, and thus limited as an aspirational goal for our system of higher education. This is all the more relevant now that the development and use of Generative AI burst onto the scene, demanding a recalculation of both how we teach and what we assess.
We also tend to teach from an amoral, empirical standpoint devoid of any moral foundation. While I do not advocate for universities to prescribe a definition for moral thought, it is imperative that we challenge our students to develop their own moral compasses. Moral decision-making is what distinguishes humanity, and empathy is key not only for both career success and personal happiness. With technology advancing rapidly and many aspects of our social order in flux, it may be time we rethink our institutional learning outcomes and educational aims. The “Human Skills” As a result, my teaching has adapted to focus on the skills that are most important for leadership development (what I refer to as the “human skills”): complex problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, coordinating with and managing people, emotional intelligence, negotiation, and cognitive flexibility. These human skills are important across all disciplines, cultures, and professions.
But what is the best way to include these skills in teaching and learning activities, especially in a manner that is appropriate for all students, and in a way that is flexible enough to cater for individual needs and interests? And how do we build courses that appropriately teach and assess required course content while simultaneously adapting and staying ahead of the waves of change? These questions have largely defined my teaching at HKU, and I have constantly tried to find new and better ways of reaching my students, and hopefully developing them into more confident leaders. Indeed, it is safe to say that my teaching has manifested one constant: change. In the 13 years I have been teaching, I have taught 7 different undergraduate subjects in both the Law and Business Faculties, proactively developing 4 out of those 7 courses from scratch due to societal changes for which I believe students lacked preparation. I also developed multiple taught postgraduate courses, as well as a successful MOOC on behalf of the University. But my teaching development really began by learning from, and trying to improve upon, courses developed by other educators.
First Stage of Teaching Development: Improving what Existed
I began my HKU career teaching law courses that already existed. Legal education is often criticized for being slow to adapt. True to form, the courses I “adopted” were effectively taught the same way for decades. Within my first two years of teaching, I applied blended learning and continual assessment approaches to each of these courses, which at the time were unconventional in a legal context. These were not immediately welcomed changes, but after seeing improvement in both the student approval and assessment scores, I am happy to say that many of my suggested changes were adopted by other teachers and remain the common practice for those courses today.
Second Stage: Identifying What Did Not Exist
While initially teaching existing courses, I soon identified an area of need: ethics. After researching the subject, I learned that studies from around the world indicate that business, finance, and economics students are often outperformed by their peers in several key areas of moral behavior. Studies seem to show that such students cheated more, acted in less cooperative ways, were less empathetic, and more self-centered than many of their student peers. Having been a lawyer who represented large financial institutions involved in the Global Financial Crisis and seeing firsthand the incredible devastation that comes from a myopic view of profit over purpose, I was genuinely concerned that we may be unwittingly creating amoral decision makers rather than conscious, moral business leaders.
My concern was further compounded by the fact that we did not have any business ethics courses at HKU, whether required or otherwise. Feeling that this was too important of a subject to ignore, especially given the state of the world at that time, I decided to approach the Business Faculty about adding ethics courses for our UG students. I have since developed multiple ethics courses, which have been well received by our students. My colleague and I even co-authored the first English language business ethics textbook specifically focused on Asia and developed the first fintech ethics course. That award-winning course, entitled FinTech Ethics and Risks has enrolled over 18,000 people around the world, with a 61.42% course completion rate based on verified users and 80.1% video completion rate based on all enrolled students (both significantly above global MOOC averages).
Enhancement of Experiential Learning
While building courses focusing on leadership development, I identified a consistent hurdle impeding students from gaining the human skills: experience. Many students from HKU graduate without ever having a full-time job. Working full-time is not only physically and mentally demanding, but it also puts one in a position to make observable and costly mistakes. Thus, by not working our students are left with an interesting challenge: most of them do not know how to fail well. Risk aversion has been so ingrained that many of our students fear failure more than they desire success. As a result, I began to devise strategies for my students to get real-world leadership experience. In 2011, after struggling to find sufficient quality opportunities, I asked a group of students a question that has changed my life: “If I start a company, will you run it for me?” This proposition of “risk-free entrepreneurship” was not originally a part of my teaching duties; I simply wanted to offer my students more opportunities for leadership. But after months of hard work, my students and I incorporated our first social enterprise: Soap Cycling. At the time, the Business Faculty did not have any credit-bearing experiential learning programs. After the success of Soap Cycling’s leadership model, and at the Faculty’s invitation, I agreed to help develop experiential learning courses for our students. I have since helped develop multiple experiential courses in the Business and Law Faculties, as well as consulting on other experiential programs at HKU. I would like to discuss two of these experiential courses.
Impact Lab
Impact Lab is a unique experiential business course focusing on developing leadership through real-life management opportunities. Typical experiential learning is based on “learning by doing” while reflecting real world experience. Impact Lab does not reflect the real world – it is the real world. And based on their amazing work, our students and companies regularly receive media attention, including multiple front-page SCMP stories, and features in global outlets like the BBC. Impact Lab is interdisciplinary and multicultural, having hosted 1,128 students from 57 countries and 126 universities, including students from nearly every Faculty at HKU. Since its inception, Impact Lab students have contributed 135,360 hours of work in 39 social enterprises and projects. Amazingly, seven social enterprises have been created via the course, meaning that they were founded by someone connected to Impact Lab. It’s worth noting that 97.2% of Impact Lab students report they became “more employable” because of their involvement in the course. I am particularly proud to say that some of our former students have rejoined our companies as members of the board of directors or full-time employees.
Global Migration Legal Clinic
The Global Migration Legal Clinic (“GMLC”) was co-developed by Lindsay Ernst from HKU’s Law Faculty and me. With Lindsay’s experience and network, having trained hundreds of NGO leaders throughout the region, and my practical understanding of managing projects, GMLC students have been able to work on cases dealing with cross-border fraud, money laundering, human trafficking, passport withholding, and many other issues. Among the many projects that have developed via GMLC, our EmpowerU program stands apart. Through EmpowerU thousands of domestic workers have taken classes – taught by both HKU students and professors – at HKU on the weekends, leading to Lindsay Ernst and me winning the HKU Outstanding Teaching Award (Team) in 2020.
Impact Based Learning
Through course creation, building sustainable social enterprises, and focusing on ethics and leadership development, I began to develop what I believe is a new type of pedagogical model. Impact Based Learning is a hybrid of action-based, experiential, and service learning, taking these pedagogical concepts one step further to focus on areas delivering sustained social impact.
The model is distinguished from service learning because students are not asked to serve in a one-off capacity, but to work toward sustainable and lasting ends, particularly in the business or entrepreneurial context. For example, whereas service learning typically provides students with a one-off service opportunity that is managed by an external partner, Impact Based Learning directly creates lasting impact through building sustainable social impact companies and projects.
Although we naturally gain knowledge as an inherent process of doing things, a genuine experiential learning process requires more than just “doing stuff.” Students should be allowed time to reflect, to connect with people of divergent backgrounds and experiences, and to solve complex problems. Impact Based Learning may not be appropriate for every course but based on the success of Impact Lab and GMLC, I believe this model can be developed further and expanded beyond HKU.
In September 2022, Soap Cycling celebrated its 10-year anniversary. During that decade, hundreds of HKU students have helped develop the company into a multinational program with operations in The Philippines, Singapore, China mainland, and Hong Kong, delivering nearly 5 million bars of soap to disadvantaged communities across Asia, and removing thousands of tons of solid waste from landfills. And this was only the first of several companies to come from our experiential learning programs.
What’s next?
Though I have been teaching for 13 years, I still have so much to learn. My hope is that by remaining curious and proactive, I will continue developing teaching, learning, and assessment models that challenge our students to nurture the leadership skills that are so needed throughout society.
