ABSTRACT
Intellectual property (IP) education is one of the core areas in the undergraduate curriculum of City University of Hong Kong which focuses on nurturing students’ creativity and innovation. This paper describes an online course at CityU which introduces students to the basic concepts of IP and informs them of the importance of IP for their university study and future career. The course consists of 7 modules, covering different types of IP, values of IP for students, and some important issues which students may come across in their study and future career. Modules are designed to present concepts mainly through animations, each lasts less than 10 minutes, with a minimal amount of text. After each module, there is a quiz with 5 scenario questions randomly drawn from a pool of 15 questions. All questions require students to apply the concepts learned from the module to a practical context to demonstrate their understanding. The course was launched in September 2018 and since then 95 students enrolled. Among them, 23 completed all 7 modules or completed some of them. This paper investigates student pattern of access to the online modules. Preliminary results showed that students viewed the module “IP & Student” more frequently and viewed the module “Copyright” less frequently. However, they made more attempts on the quizzes of the modules “IP & Student”, “Patent” and “Software” than the other modules and got lower scores in the modules “Patent” and “Software”. In particular, students had difficulties answering the questions related to determining IP ownership and patentability of computer program. This suggests that these 2 topics should be emphasized in the future IP education.
KEYWORDS
Online course, e-learning, intellectual property education