The pace of e-learning has accelerated over the last few years. The government supports schools upgrading hardware and software to keep pace with the evolving trend in education.

The Education Bureau has invested more than HK$10 billion since the 1998-99 school year to implement three strategies advancing IT in Education along with other major e-learning initiatives.

Erwin Huang, WebOrganic's chief executive officer, who has helped the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer implement the Internet Learning Support Programme for students from low-income families, said e-learning permits a customized learning path. "Digitalization facilitates personalization," Huang said. Teachers are able to spot an individual student's learning difficulty and offer extra help.

To train more and more teachers to be ready for the transition, Huang recommends that the Quality Education Fund allocate the budget for schools to hire experienced teachers in classroom innovation.

The three-year pilot project introducing e-learning at 61 primary, secondary, and special schools, aims at continuous and sustainable deployment of e-learning, the development of professional capacity, and the integration of evolving approaches to IT teaching into the curriculum. Achievements and lessons learned from individual schools were shared with other schools.

The Education Bureau now invites 20 schools a year to join the Centre of Excellence Scheme. Each of them sends two teachers to make school visits and offer on-site support to other schools in teaching as well as technological and managerial issues related to IT-based education.

Huang has seen more and more schools learning from Centre of Excellence schools, as the importance of going digital catches on. "The time element is now on our side and it is the right time for the whole e-learning thing to take off."

(HK Edition 12/01/2015 page10)