Teaching degrees in Hong Kong: As STEM education gathers steam, universities are updating their postgraduate courses to equip educators with the relevant skills
- Hong Kong does not have enough STEM professionals in the education system to train youngsters with the core competencies needed to pursue relevant careers
- While the Education Bureau still doesn’t recognise STEM as an official subject, institutions like HKU and EdUHK are stepping up efforts to meet a growing demand
As technology evolves at breakneck pace, educators must keep up or get left behind. This means training education technology (edtech) specialists, as well as a sufficient number of STEM teachers to keep up with demand.
The University of Hong Kong’s (HKU) Faculty of Education – one of the top education faculties in Asia – has been taking such forward-thinking steps. This includes changing one of its flagship programmes, the 15-year-old Master of Science in Information Technology in Education, to the Master of Science in Technology, Design and Leadership for Learning (MSc-TDLL).
“We recognise that there have been a lot of changes and that the programme needs to be flexible and updated to the needs of society and the current education system,” explained programme director Daniel Churchill. “Especially since mobile technology has been taking on a much more prominent role since we started back in 2008. We have this technology – like tablets and mobile devices – becoming much more powerful than even computers were back then.”
After a review, Churchill and the rest of the faculty decided to change the name to encapsulate the skills and values the programme is trying most to impart.
“It’s not just a tech programme or a computer science programme,” he said. “It involves the strategic implementation of technologies in education – and this can be used in fields like human development, corporate training, publishing and any other field in which people learn new things.”
