Service-learning is a high-touch pedagogy that brings universities in close contact with communities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Hong Kong Baptist University's Centre for Innovative Service-Learning embarked on a project to integrate virtual teaching and learning with service-learning to sustain class and community interactions amidst social distancing measures and other pandemic-related restrictions. The chapter reports the project experience. Based on data from teachers, students, and community members involved in the project, the study combined qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate three questions: Which virtual teaching and learning tools were employed by service-learning's stakeholders? How did the use of virtual teaching and learning tools impact service-learning's stakeholders? And, finally, what lessons were learned about integrating virtual teaching and learning with service-learning? The chapter also discusses advantages and drawbacks of virtual technology when applied to service-learning and proposes a forward-looking approach towards virtual service-learning.
TopIntroduction
Service-learning is an experiential, civic pedagogy through which students apply their academic learning to address community needs or social issues. Service-learning has been identified as a “high-impact” educational practice (Kuh, 2008), and may also be said to be “high-touch” because it brings university faculty members and students in close contact with community partners and service recipients. In the post-Covid era, service-learning should not only be “high-impact” and “high-touch” but also “high-tech” (Ngai et al., 2021).
The Covid-19 pandemic began to affect Hong Kong in late 2019. The need to contain the virus through social distancing measures and travel restrictions posed major difficulties in the teaching and service delivery of service-learning courses. In light of the situation, Hong Kong Baptist University’s (HKBU) Centre for Innovative Service-Learning (CISL) embarked on a project entitled “Integrating Service-Learning and Virtual Teaching and Learning Technologies: A Collaborative Project with Teachers and Community Partners”, or Virtual Teaching and Learning in Service-Learning (VTL-SL) for short. The VTL-SL project aimed to integrate the use of virtual teaching & learning tools in delivering service-learning courses and community projects. The project adopted a train-the-trainer approach for service-learning staff, teachers, and community partners who were involved in either creating new virtual teaching & learning service-learning courses, or in transforming existing service-learning courses into virtual teaching & learning format. Five departments of the university were involved in the VTL-SL project, which spanned one and a half years from August 2021 to June 2023. The project’s immediate objective was to sustain service-learning practices and community interactions during the pandemic. At the same time, the VTL-SL project had a more far-reaching objective to explore new teaching strategies, that is, to maximize the use of existing and emerging information and communication technologies (ICT) in order to update and develop service-learning pedagogy as well as community projects implemented through service-learning courses.
An important feature of the VTL-SL project was the Centre’s partnership with the Society for Innovation and Technology in Social Work (SITSW), a social enterprise founded by social workers and experts dedicated to promoting technology and innovation to develop people-oriented services. SITSW worked with CISL to: (1) design virtual teaching & learning service-learning courses, (2) deliver virtual teaching & learning training workshops for service-learning instructors, and (3) evaluate the project’s effectiveness and outcomes.
In this chapter, we discuss HKBU CISL’s VTL-SL project experience and its outcomes on service-learning’s different stakeholders. While the primary focus will be on student outcomes, the project’s impact on community partners and service-learning teachers will also be tackled. The discussion will center around three research questions (RQ):
RQ 1 Which virtual teaching & learning tools were employed by the service-learning courses’ stakeholders (i.e., instructors, students, and community partners or members)?
RQ 2 How did the use of virtual teaching & learning tools impact service-learning’s stakeholders?
Finally,
RQ 3 What did we learn from the project about integrating virtual teaching & learning in service-learning?
Answers to RQs 1 and 2 will be covered in the Results section, while RQ 3 will be addressed in the concluding discussion.
TopLiterature Review
Virtual teaching & learning refers to various ways of enhancing learning experiences through digital platforms and technology. Virtual teaching & learning thus advances in the measure that ICT evolves. Discourse about leveraging technology in university education was already surging before the Covid-19 pandemic as practices such as online courses and webinars, e-learning modules, flipped and hybrid classrooms, and using virtual reality and augmented reality to create immersive learning experiences spread. Exploring how to cater to the learning styles of the “virtual generation”, Proserpio and Gioia (2007) explained the need to reevaluate traditional teaching in such a way as to integrate more technology and, at the same time, enhance active learning by engaging students in ICT-mediated research and problem-solving approaches.