Opinion | How Hong Kong can lead the world in digital education

The city’s academic institutions have what it takes to integrate artificial intelligence into education and entice students from around the world

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Over a 100 million people, including students, around the world use AI-powered applications every day. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 9:30am, 13 Nov 2024Updated: 11:18am, 13 Nov 2024

Hong Kong’s digital education objectives can be truly global and reach many different cultures, languages and nationalities. Imagine a student in Malaysia. Every day after work he heads to his favourite coffee house in Penang, puts in his earphones and starts to learn. He’s working his way to a master’s degree in engineering.

Some day, all this learning can flow from Hong Kong as a regional and global education hub. Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu’s third policy address highlighted promoting the “Study in Hong Kong” brand to attract overseas students, particularly from countries that are part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Hong Kong’s ambitions to be a global education hub can also expand to include remote learning and instruction powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

Hong Kong has many of the necessary pieces to make it work. Five of Hong Kong’s universities are on the world’s top 100 list, with the University of Hong Kong now ranking 17th, according to QS World University Rankings.

The city’s East-meets-West culture and thriving business environment are well suited to the design of higher education experiences for international students. While the pieces needed to realise these education hub objectives are already here, they have yet to be strategically assembled.

As always with education, the teachers come first. To gain global traction, Hong Kong must continue to recruit and develop international and diverse instructor talent. To truly engage and be relevant across cultures requires a global mindset. Even assuming English is the lingua franca of tertiary education, effectively navigating the national, religious and other cultural pluralities is not a task that all academics are prepared for.