This course provides an experiential learning opportunity for students to work directly for social ventures in management level roles. Students will have opportunities to establish and grow real businesses that have a social purpose.

Students will have opportunities to apply academic principles previously learned, but will also be confronted with real-life issues and problems for which they are unprepared. Students will be engaged in problem solving and business building within a supervised learning environment, enabling real life skills development and personal growth.

The course DENT5031 facilitates final-year students to understand the dental needs in the community, particularly the population with suboptimal resources and manpower, and plan the dental services and oral health prevention strategies. They may practice outreach dental service to needy or rural overseas regions, or experience the clinical training in overseas dental institutions.

Students will gain practical experience and establish their social responsibility from the experiential learning. Through interaction with community and people from different cultures and social backgrounds, their communication skills and sense of global citizen will be enhanced.

Students will join the HKU-HKRAC Clinical Legal Education Programme to provide service for unmet legal needs in the community and their pro-bono ethic and long-term commitment to public service and public interest law will be cultivated. The curriculum gives students opportunity to hone their professional skills through contact with real clients and to deepen their knowledge and understanding of the law through producing a range of real legal products to solve real legal problems.

The course promotes a culture of experiential learning by opening students’ eyes to the real practice of human rights law both domestically and internationally. Students will have chances to meet with a myriad of professionals, advocates, social service providers and community leaders to gain a holistic understanding of the law and society.

The project is an integral part of a Common Core Course CCHU9023, which explores how humankind has been working with the environment both as a means for survival and as expressions of culture. The discipline and medium of land art are introduced to students via a ‘Land Art Workshop & Exhibition’ in which students are to explore creative options to express their environmental concerns and opinions via the process of making art.

The course is unique and valuable for students as they will gain first-hand experience in conducting field study to learn about the selected districts and work with the community to create works that will have direct impacts on the local residents. Students can learn how environmental issues would be best and most effective to be communicated to the public via art work.

The course provides students first-hand experience of landscape architecture of an urban farm in Pokfulam Village. Collaborating with Caritas Pokfulam Community Development Project, the urban farm serves both community and educational purposes. This is a good opportunity to turn an abandoned land into productive use, e.g. for local villages to grow their own crops, providing a better living environment for the residents.

Students will gain practical experience that tests out knowledge learned in classroom, and engages with a real community and real site to understand the pragmatic needs and expectation from a local basis and to propose solutions that fit the community needs socially.

“Thailand’s Water Economies” is a multi-year teaching project that incorporates experiential learning in the landscape planning curriculum and involves considerable community engagement. The project provides deep understanding of Thailand’s hydrological landscape, aiming to propose alternative landscape planning solutions to the ecological and planning problems that exit along the Chao Phraya River. Students will offer an independent voice regarding the problems as an alternative to the planning agencies, industrial agricultural operators and NGOs.

Students’ active participation in the research, collection of data, community engagement with Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and relevant stakeholders, and their application of professional knowledge and research information to design solutions mirror the implementation of experiential learning in the curriculum. The project has direct impact on students’ learning of design knowledge, their cognitive strategy use, and their motivation towards learning.

Understanding and engaging first-hand the history, concerns, and programmatic requirements of the stakeholders and users of a particular landscape or site is fundamental to the practice of landscape architecture. Thus, the course ARCH2041/3029 Environment Community and Design aims to engage students in real world examples of theoretical situations through experiential learning in order to make a difference in their community. The project is to ‘practice what we preach’ – the practice of community engagement or action research is not just one step on the road to a design; it is the subject and end goal of the class in itself.

Students will conduct researches on current ‘real world” cultural, social and environmental issues that affect local communities in Hong Kong. They will then integrate research, documentation and community consultation in order to propose and execute a public community engagement exercise or intervention that addresses the issues and concerns raised through the research and consultation process. Students will develop social awareness and enhance their ability to identify, understand and communicate “real life” community needs in order to incorporate them into their academic and professional proposals and projects.

This project is a part of a 6-credit course POLI0098, Nonprofit Management, for students to utilize multimedia tools to promote social values created by nonprofit organizations or social enterprises. Students will work directly with community partners to identify the social values created by their community partners, and then create multimedia film to promote them. The multimedia projects contain innovative and persuasive arguments based on research and theories, and solid evidence from field visits and observations of the operation of the nonprofits.

The course provides a platform to students to develop essential skills and analytical techniques in coping with various management challenges of nonprofit organisations and apply management knowledge to real-life problem-solving in managing nonprofits. They will also gain hand-on experience while working with nonprofits, to diagnose the problems and challenges of creating social value, and prepare future leaders for the nonprofit sector.

The project is part of the Year 2 Design Studio of the course ARCH2054, Introduction to Architecture Studio. Students will be introduced to the real-life situation of village reconstruction in China today. In collaboration with Habitat for Humanity, students will make a house design based upon the direct input and consultation with villagers and the real-life conditions of Changliu Village in Guangdong, China.

Students will gain hand-on experience on design of a standard village house incorporating traditional and modern design techniques, comprehension of social and economic drivers for the village reconstruction phenomenon in rural China, and interaction with villagers in real-life situations throughout the experiential learning project.

CLIT2097 (Independent Documentaries: Theory and Practice) is a new course for Year 2 and 3 students studying film, media, and visuality to acquire auditory-visual literacy. Students will form groups to complete independent documentaries of local life using still and moving images gathered from Pokfulam Village (the main site) in partnership with an NGO which provides liaison in Village. The course aims to train the students to face the challenges of approaching and connecting with the community members to discover and tell their stories.