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In Hong Kong, onscreen marking (OSM) is superseding paper-based marking (PBM) across the entire national examinations system. This paper describes a qualitative study of the attitudes of Liberal Studies markers towards OSM. This becomes a compulsory subject in Hong Kong's new senior secondary school curriculum to be first examined in 2012, with a candidature of 80 000 compared to the current candidatures of 3300. The current study describes semi-structured interviews with Liberal Studies markers who provided in-depth opinions on key aspects of the OSM process. Markers were positive about many aspects of the new system including: the advantages of marking by single question rather than by whole paper; improved reliability using control scripts; and relief from administrative tasks associated with PBM. There are, nonetheless, aspects of the new system that markers are unhappy with, primarily logistical, involving travel to marking centres and marking at fixed times when they are tired. Reading onscreen was also an issue. In summary, 43% of markers stated that they preferred the status quo of PBM, 35% stated they felt OSM was better, while 21% were ambivalent. While OSM has not yet been wholeheartedly accepted by markers, its potential advantages are beginning to be appreciated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immersive virtual reality (IVR) is regarded as one of the contemporary technological innovations with rich educational potential. As a subset of IVR, spherical video‐based IVR (SV‐IVR) immerses users centrally in a human‐recorded real‐world environment, allowing them to explore the environment in any directions via mobile phones and cardboard goggles. We have proposed a pedagogical framework—Learner‐Immersed Virtual Interactive Expedition (LIVIE), which leverages SV‐IVR to integrate immersive and interactive virtual inquiry‐based fieldwork into learning and teaching of physical geography. Besides discussing the design of LIVIE, this paper reports on the quasi‐experimental study that we carried out to evaluate its pedagogical effectiveness. The research subjects were 566 students from upper, middle and lower academic‐category secondary schools in Hong Kong. The study showed that LIVIE had different degrees of positive effects on the high, moderate and low academic‐achieving subjects. Our work not only provides evidence for supporting wider adoption of LIVIE in geography education, but it also sheds light on how to design and implement the pedagogical use of SV‐IVR in school education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]