About us
Introduction
Since its establishment in 2006, the Office of Service-Learning (OSL) unflaggingly facilitates exciting Service-Learning courses that allow students to make a positive impact on society by applying their academic knowledge outside of the classroom. OSL collaborates with faculty members to coordinate Service-Learning projects for courses from the Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Business, Faculty of Social Sciences, School of Interdisciplinary Studies, and School of Data Science. It also offers several courses in human-centered design innovation, humanitarian technology, and inclusive entrepreneurship. During summer and winter, OSL organizes inspiring programmes abroad, offering students a unique opportunity to be a part of hands-on impactful projects in countries such as Cambodia, Kazakhstan, Nepal, the Philippines and Uganda.
OSL's accomplishment in AY 2023/24
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Our Vision
Continue to be Asia's Global Knowledge Exchange Platform for delivering innovative solutions to important problems with stakeholders.
Our Mission
We enable Lingnanians to initiate innovative projects that address pressing yet often overlooked community needs. The changemakers we nurture are unique — they value stakeholders’ voices, consciously leverage the power of technology and entrepreneurship, and actively transfer knowledge learned.
Key Initiatives
Having introduced team teaching, design thinking, and creative innovation in recent years, OSL is steadily building its capacity as a hub for social innovation in Asia targeting to solve local as well as global issues.
OSL believes in the power of social innovation. We equip students with tools to integrate research-oriented innovation in the problem-solving process. Design thinking is one of these tools, a method that teaches students to envision creative solutions to problems and build prototypes to rapidly test out their ideas. Each social innovation project is impact-oriented and offers students the learning opportunity to take advantage of their broad liberal arts education to become innovative problem solvers.
Humanitarian technology is meant to improve the lives of the global underprivileged through the implementation of effective yet affordable technology. Innovation does not need to entail the invention of an entirely new technology: making an existing technology more affordable and/or usable in new settings and situations can be just as effective.
Humanitarian technology can be effectively integrated into Service-Learning to broaden students' perspective on global grand challenges, and provide them with creative confidence and the skillset to make a difference. For instance, in the Service-Learning courses CLC9019 Policy and Technology for Urban and Rural Sustainability and CLA9021 Innovation and Entrepreneurship for Global Grand Challenges offered by OSL, students are encouraged to design solutions for contemporary global issues by rethinking what can be done with current technology.
In one Service-Learning project, Lingnan students designed an affordable air purifier for subdivided flat inhabitants after meeting with underprivileged community members and discovering that bad air quality was one of their daily concerns. By using low-cost materials, these students were able to make a working, inexpensive prototype, which serves as the basis for a future product that will improve the lives of many people who are struggling daily with bad air-quality.
Empowering Innovations
OSL believes in promoting Inclusive Entrepreneurship—anyone can become an entrepreneur, regardless of university major, background, gender, etc.
Liberal arts students are good at looking beyond disciplinary boundaries and envisioning new possibilities. Lingnan Entrepreneurship Initiative (LEI) provides an entrepreneurship platform that aims to harness the transformative power of liberal arts education to drive innovation, growth, and social development.
The main challenges that non-traditional entrepreneurs face are lack of startup capital, a perceived lack of technical skills, and lack of experience with entrepreneurship. Lingnan assists students in those aspects by:
Funding Opportunities
Enrichment Programmes
Experiencing Entrepreneurship