The purpose of this Progress Report is to address, as directly and forthrightly as possible, the actions taken in the past year in response to the recommendations contained in the UGC’s report on teaching and learning quality processes at HKUST. Recognizing that we must be judged by actions, not words, the report will not devote space to rhetoric about the importance we attach to teaching, or how seriously we have taken the advice of the TLQPR Panel. On the other hand, we believe it will provide credible evidence of both these facts.

In order to be reasonably comprehensive, this Progress Report repeats to some extent information contained in the Interim Report submitted on 11 July 1997. To minimize the duplication, however, it does not repeat all of the chronology of the events that took place between receipt of the TLQPR Report and the submission of the Interim Report to the UGC. Much of what is new in this report is the result of the follow-up to the work of the Senate Task Forces whose work was described in the Interim Report. A number of major changes to the quality assurance framework for teaching and learning have emerged from those discussions, including the decisions of the Senate at its meeting in February 1998 that are contained in the Annexes. In addition, this report will describe and assess the results of the initiatives that were in the planning or early implementation stages by July 1997.

The next section of the Progress Report contains a summary of the actions taken during the past year to strengthen teaching and learning and the relevant quality assurance processes. A brief outline of the matters covered is given below:

• Quality Assurance Processes

Senate Committee on Teaching and Learning Quality

Use and dissemination of course evaluation results

Policies and procedures for course and program administration

Senate policy on curriculum management

• Curriculum Design

Restructure Humanities and Social Science curriculum

Introduction of Humanities and Social Science minors

Expansion of English language requirements

Senate Committee on General Education

Senate Sub-Committee on Language Education

• Teaching Assistants

Appointment of TA Coordinators

Evaluation of TA performance

Orientation and training of TAs

• Student Input

School-wide consultations with students

Senate policy on student-staff liaison committees

• Support for teaching improvement

Distribution of orientation materials for new teachers

Creation of centers for teaching and learning technology

Reorganization plans for instructional development

To make this report as clear a response to the TLQPR Report as possible, the summary of actions is followed by a series of sections, each of which responds to a specific paragraph in the part of the TLQPR Report titled Areas of Improvement. For easy reference, the language of the relevant paragraph is included in a box at the start of each section. References to a specific action often appear in several of these sections, since the action relates to more than one of the Report’s observations.