Congratulations to Professor CK Woo, who has won a Gold Medal for his teaching development grant project’s invention, “Online Assessment System for Individual Scores (OASIS)” at the 2021 International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva.
Co-developed by Dr Henry So of MIT and researchers at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, OASIS is a fair and transparent assessment method that ex ante discourages free-riding before a team project’s commencement and ex post punishes free-riders when such behavior is found to exist upon the project’s completion. It has been implemented by 28 teachers and ~1,800 students across nine universities in the US, Hong Kong, mainland China, and India. Empirics to date comprises the following findings. First, OASIS encourages student participation in a team project through its contractual commitment and performance-based scoring method. Second, it readily detects free riders in a team project. Third, OASIS uses peer assessment data to fairly score individual contributions by a team project’s members. Finally, it is user-friendly and benefits students, teachers, and university management. Based on the current users’ positive feedback, Prof Woo expects more OASIS users in the coming academic years.
Separately, OASIS has been adapted for commercial application. A case in point is a large US toy company with two production plants in Guangdong. This company’s management used a modified version of OASIS in 2020 to determine individual year-end bonuses for members in team projects related to toy design, production and marketing, thus underscoring OASIS’s knowledge transfer to the business sector.
The International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva is one of the most important knowledge and technology transfer events in the world devoted exclusively to inventions. EdUHK was awarded 7 international prizes from the event, and it is a first-ever gold award from the Exhibition to EdUHK. Earlier, Prof Woo has been awarded a Gold Medal with this project at the 2020 IIC International Innovation Competition.
