UGFN1000, In Dialogue with Nature, is a compulsory general education foundation course for all students in The Chinese University of Hong Kong. This course requires students to read science-related classics on their own and to discuss the core questions brought up by the classics that are enduring in the history of human civilizations. The discussion shall then be put in modern context to stimulate the students to formulate their own view on contemporary issues from a new horizon.
As a 3-unit course, each week, a 1-hour session of lecture and a 2-hour session of interactive tutorial are dedicated for each of the 11 classics within UGFN syllabus. However, teachers and students often reported that the 1-hour lecture is insufficient to provide necessary background knowledge for the students to handle the specific classic text on their own. It is common that most of the time in the 2-hour interactive tutorial is used not for the discussion of the core questions but for the comprehension of the textual meaning of the classics.
This website contains a suite of micro-modules for each classics. The basic idea is to have the micro-modules to give further background knowledge to the students in various aspects related to the comprehension of each specific classic text in addition to the corresponding 1-hour lecture. This allows freeing up the 2 hours invaluable face-to-face teacher-student interactive tutorial for deeper discussions and reflections on the core questions and be able to relate them to modern issues and themselves.
- Teacher: Kai Ming Kiang
- Teacher: Chi Tat Li
An Interactive Journey through the Nephron
This module covers basic concepts of Cellular Energetics. It mainly talks about the basic knowledge of enzyme such as its history, properties and kinetics.
This online module covers two main concepts of Ecosystem, being the energy flow and matter cycling respectively.
In this course, you are going to revise some of the basic biological processes and techniques you have learnt in “Genetics and Evolution”; “Health and Diseases” and “Biotechnology” of your high school Biology curriculum. There are totally three topics, (1) Huntington’s disease, (2) Human Papillomavirus Vaccine and (3) Genetic screening. They are going to show you how the biochemistry and biotechnology techniques you have learnt in lessons applied in the real scientific world.
In each topic, there are basically four parts: (1) Information for self-study shown by plain text. (2) Animation and Virtual labs. (3) Revision exercises (MCQs) and (4) assessment quiz. Certificate of Achievement is automatically generated passing the quizzes.
Length: 4-6 hours (Self-paced)
Course last updated: August 2021
- Teacher: PC Shaw