at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
on 9 December 1999

Prof Cheng, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen,

First of all, I should like to add my own warm welcome to those visiting Hong Kong for this Conference. As you can see with your own eyes, Hong Kong continues to thrive as one of the world's most vibrant and energetic economies - recently reconfirmed as the freest in the world by the Heritage Foundation.

I feel honoured to have been invited to speak today at the opening of the First Asia-Pacific Conference on Problem-Based Learning. This feeling stems not only from the fact that it is the first conference of this nature focussing on health sciences, but also from its being hosted by the management team of a project funded by the University Grants Committee (UGC). The project, started in 1997 and entitled "Enhancing the quality of health-services education through the introduction of problem-based learning", has clearly been a success. I have no doubt the same can be expected of this Conference, which I am pleased to see has attracted over 200 delegates from all over South East Asia, Australia, North America and Europe.

We shall shortly, in some twenty-two days to be precise, be entering a new millennium - or the last year of the current one if you have a pedantic turn of mind, like mine. With the rapid development of technology and consequently how things are done in this dynamic world, it is essential for new means of and approaches to teaching and learning to be developed to ensure that our students will be highly adaptive to increasingly-keen competition and rapidly-changing career demands.

In recent years, there has been increasing concern about the didactic methods of teaching currently used in Hong Kong. While adequate for the transmission of facts, such methods, it is argued, do not appropriately prepare students for the challenges they will face in a work environment characterised by constant and rapid change, where the half-life of knowledge is short and managing uncertainty is vital. There is thus a need for curriculum models which are flexible, student-centred, more interactive and which broaden the learning experience of students to address a wider range of core competencies like problem solving, critical thinking, organisation skills and management skills.

It is in this context that problem-based learning, an interactive, student-centred educational methodology, emerged. Problem-based learning has been defined as "the process of acquiring understanding, knowledge, skills and attitudes in the context of an unfamiliar situation, and applying such learning to that situation" (Engel).

The problem-based learning approach encourages deep rather than surface learning by focussing the teaching and learning process fully on the student, and by recognising that the process and context of learning are often as important as the content. It is also an exciting way to learn, to motivate students to learn and to strengthen their ability in self-learning. Throughout the Asia-Pacific region, there is an increasing use of problem-based learning better to prepare students for the challenges of the future.

In Hong Kong, the University of Hong Kong (HKU) has been introducing problem-based learning in a range of health science disciplines. In the last triennium, the funding period 1995-1998, the UGC allocated $6.5 million in the form of Teaching Development Grants for HKU to launch the project. The project team's efforts to develop problem-based learning have, I understand, also drawn in part on the outcomes of two other large scale UGC-funded projects, the Action Learning Project and the Evaluation of the Student Experience Project, both of which yielded valuable information about the characteristics of Hong Kong students and the nature of their tertiary experience.

The present project was also a collaborative effort involving not only HKU, but also the Hong Kong Institute of Education and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. It aimed to encourage health-science teachers in Hong Kong, through 12 sub-projects, to develop skills in problem-based learning and, in particular, to prepare teachers for the new systems of teaching and methods of assessing the performance of students required by new problem-based learning curricula. The project has encouraged other departments of the University to investigate and adopt the problem-based learning strategy.

To mark the completion of the project, this Conference is being held to disseminate the philosophy of problem-based learning and the outcomes of the 12 sub-projects to a wider audience in and beyond Hong Kong.

Building on the success of the project, HKU has embarked on a larger scale project entitled "Establishing Hong Kong as a Centre for Problem-based Learning" to further promote the use of problem-based learning beyond its nine health sciences departments. A further $6 million, again in the form of Teaching Development Grants, has been awarded by the UGC to support this further project, which I would like to take this opportunity of wishing every success.

On a more general note, I would like to place the present project in the context of the UGC's efforts to promote quality assurance and enhancement through new initiatives in teaching and learning.

It has been suggested that the UGC places more emphasis on research than it does on teaching. This is a fairly new perception in Hong Kong, and in some ways a not unreasonable one under the circumstances. It is also a charge that could be levelled, with even more justification, at universities and university funding agencies elsewhere, I might say. It has in fact emerged in Hong Kong as a result of the establishment of our Research Grants Council in 1991, with a charter to develop and support research in our universities, and the linking of outcomes of the UGC's periodic Research Assessment Exercises, the first of which was undertaken in 1993, to the allocation of part of institutional recurrent funding.

However, the bulk of the institutions' operating grants are still provided for the teaching and learning enterprise that is central to higher education. Moreover, I can assure you that the UGC does not attach any less importance to teaching and learning. Indeed as the Committee has said and written on several occasions, the UGC regards teaching and hence learning as the primary mission of all the institutions under its aegis. The UGC's support for good teaching is also evident in its various initiatives to support new developments and quality improvements in teaching and learning. One of them, as you may have picked up from what I said earlier about the PBL project, is Teaching Development Grants. Over the past six years, we have awarded a total of $386 million in the form of Teaching Development Grants and other grants to support such initiatives, including the $12.5 million allocated to support the PBL projects.

Another initiative of the UGC to assure the quality of teaching and learning in our institutions was the round of Teaching and Learning Quality Process Review (TLQPRs) undertaken in 1995 to 1997 which aimed to focus attention on teaching and learning as the primary mission of Hong Kong's tertiary institutions; and to assist institutions in their efforts to improve the quality of teaching and learning.

These reviews have been independently evaluated by an internationally renowned group of experts from the Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Their principal conclusion was that the TLQPRs were "a right instrument at a right time" and succeeded in their main purpose, albeit, as with any such exercise, there is room for improvement in their design and conduct.

Looking forward, the UGC will organise, in collaboration with the TLQPR Consultative Committee, two seminars with institutional representatives - the first, to discuss the future conduct of TLQPRs, and to share views with and advise the UGC on the scope, design, timing, methodology, etc for the next round TLQPRs (if any); and the second, later, to discuss the future use and application of the Teaching Development Grants.

Meanwhile, in an effort to promote further the sharing of good teaching and learning practices among institutions, the UGC has set aside $10 million from the recent allocation of Teaching Development Grants to support inter-institutional programmes to disseminate good teaching and learning practices as well as programmes aimed at promoting experience sharing among the institutions.

Nevertheless, I am sure you will all agree that whatever we do at the system level must be supported and enhanced at the institutional level if it is to have the effect we all wish to see, namely the continuous improvement of the quality of teaching and learning in our institutions.

It is through conferences like this that the culture of quality in teaching and learning can be spread in Hong Kong academic circles and more widely. I therefore wish the organisers and all participants in this Conference a very successful and fruitful series of discussions.

December 1999
UGC Secretariat