Most tertiary education institutions in Hong Kong incorporate research projects into their undergraduate curricula. Whether offered in the form of capstone projects, honours projects, final year projects, or dissertations, the aim is to help students to develop critical thinking abilities, academic integrity, information literacy, communication skills, and independence. These skills align with the Generic Level Descriptors in the Hong Kong Education Bureau’s Qualifications Framework and the core skill listed in the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs report. Incorporating research projects into undergraduate education equips students with transferable skills and empowers them to be lifelong learners, critical thinkers, and possibly future researchers.

Tertiary education institutions are also implementing initiatives to support students in conducting rigorous research projects and to foster a research culture for societal advancement. However, teaching students to conduct research can be challenging. The varying areas of competence and wide range of research experiences among teaching staff can affect the consistency of guidance and assessment. Meanwhile, students often face difficulties in navigating the complex research process. Lacking experience and confidence, they can struggle with designing research, gathering and analysing data, and interpreting research findings. Nonetheless, students value the freedom to choose their research topics and appreciate the independent educational process offered by these projects.
To address these challenges, the proposed project will develop and implement ‘I-Cap’: a unique one-stop student research support portal, designed with an integrated–individualised–interactive–intelligent (4-Is) framework to enhance students' research competencies and support supervisors through the teaching and learning process for undergraduate capstone (Cap) projects.

The objectives of the project will be as follows:
• To offer support for supervisors’ teaching and students’ learning of the process of conducting research
• To encourage students to engage in research activities and develop a passion for scholarly inquiry
• To enhance the quality of teaching and learning and help to foster a research culture within the Hong Kong tertiary education sector

The portal will offer convenience and inclusiveness by providing a single platform for accessing various resources related to conducting research. It will cater to different ability levels and learning styles, offering personalized support and enabling students to take charge of their learning. The portal will include text-based manuals, video tutorials, interactive modules, and downloadable templates. Feedback mechanisms will be included for students to provide comments and suggestions for improvement.

Quality assurance mechanisms will be put in place to ensure the portal's quality, effectiveness, and usability. External experts will review the material, instructional approach, and interactive elements. User feedback will be collected through surveys and interviews, and the accessibility and technical functionality of the portal will be evaluated. Ongoing development will be informed by annual user input and comparisons with similar platforms. The one-stop portal will benefit students, educators, academic support services, administrators, institutions, employers, and graduate programmes.

Most of Hong Kong's tertiary education institutions incorporate a research project into their undergraduate curricula as partial fulfilment of bachelor's degree awards. Research projects can be offered in a variety of forms, such as capstone projects, honours projects, final year projects, or dissertations. Teaching students to conduct research is important because it helps students to develop critical thinking abilities, academic integrity, information literacy, communication skills, and independence. It also helps to prepare students for future academic endeavours and fosters creativity and innovation. These skills and competencies are in line with the Generic Level Descriptors in the Hong Kong Education Bureau’s (2023) Qualifications Framework and the core skills listed in the World Economic Forum's (2023) Future of Jobs report. In general, research instruction in undergraduate education gives students transferable skills and abilities that they can use in their academic and professional endeavours, empowering them to be lifelong learners, critical thinkers, and possibly future researchers.

To promote student research, tertiary educational institutions support academics in enlisting undergraduate students to partake in rigorous research projects to broaden their horizons, improve their research skills, and foster a research culture (e.g., Walkington, 2015). Studies have shown that having undergraduates conduct research can have a significant impact on society; for example, over half of bachelor's degree holders in sociology reported applying their research expertise in their workplaces in areas such as methodological development, research design, data analysis, statistics, and the use of statistical software (e.g., Medley-Rath & Morgan, 2022; Senter, Spalter-Roth, & Van Vooren, 2015; Wilder, 2010). Furthermore, supervisors and students can create new knowledge through these research activities by conducting innovative experiments, studies, and analyses. This helps tertiary education institutions to meet global needs and support intellectual development while advancing society. However, teaching students to conduct research is a pedagogical challenge for supervisors (e.g., Brew & Mantai, 2017; Howard & Brady, 2015), and supervisors are concerned about their students' research experiences (e.g., Linn, Palmer, Baranger, Gerard, & Stone, 2015; Nordsteien, Horntvedt, & Syse, 2017).

The proposed project will develop pedagogical solutions to efficiently and effectively support the undergraduate teaching and learning of research. The project team has already investigated the problems associated with teaching undergraduates to conduct research from the supervisor and student viewpoints. The project team, which is composed of researchers and experienced supervisors, has discussed and shared several such problems from an academic viewpoint. For instance, the project topics, research types, and research designs that students choose are not always aligned with the supervisors’ varying areas of expertise. It can be challenging for supervisors to provide students with clear, concise, and relevant direction because the processes of planning, conducting, and reporting research are complicated and demand a broad variety of competencies. Given that students’ levels of competence vary, a generalised teaching plan might not be suitable for every student. However, the materials that are available to individually support student research are fragmented and scattered, with supervisors unable to access all the resources they need to mentor students from a single location. Furthermore, the wide variety of research and publication experiences possessed by supervisors might influence their interactions with students and their perceptions of what defines excellent research writing. These differences among supervisors may affect students' learning outcomes and make it more difficult to provide a reliable and uniform system of evaluation. The role of supervisors is critical to the success of student research because it can provide step-by-step supervision, teach writing skills, locate relevant information, and develop a systematic research process. In an interview, a young supervisor echoed most of the concerns of the experienced supervisors in the project team regarding the supervision process. Furthermore, it was noted that supervisors must also handle time management concerns, comprehend the significant burden on students, and offer emotional support. These findings are consistent with the literature on this topic (e.g., Linn, et al., 2015).

The project team has also met with seven final-year undergraduate students from various programmes and a fresh graduate to gain a deeper understanding of the student viewpoint. Because the year-long capstone courses do not normally include regular prescheduled classes, students discover that the course design is substantially different from that of their other courses. Students need to take the initiative to report on their progress and meet with their supervisor for direction and assistance, but they can find the complex nature of the research process overwhelming and eventually lose enthusiasm and thus become disengaged. Lacking research experience and essential research skills, they are often sceptical about their capacity to complete all phases of a research project, which include performing a literature review, seeking appropriate sources, critically evaluating information, and selecting an appropriate methodology and design. They are also concerned about collecting sufficient data, using sophisticated analytical methods, and reporting the results. They tend to lack comprehension of ethical issues and to be uncertain of the depth of knowledge that is needed to complete their research projects. Nonetheless, students value the research learning experience and the educational process of carrying out a research project as it encourages them to explore topics of interest, conduct independent research, and take ownership of their learning. These findings echo and support those of recent studies of students' research experiences (e.g., Buchanan & Fisher, 2022; Medley-Rath & Morgan, 2022).

The proposed project will make reference to the nature of conducting research, teachers’ remarks, and undergraduate students’ research experiences to develop and implement ‘I-Cap’: a unique one-stop student research support portal designed with an integrated–individualised–interactive–intelligent (4-Is) framework to enhance students' research learning experience and support supervisors in the teaching process for undergraduate capstone (Cap) projects. The use of a virtual learning environment as a teaching intervention in undergraduate research mentoring has received widespread endorsement (e.g., Hall et al., 2021). This project will aim to offer research support for students and supervisors at every stage of the research process, to improve students' research competencies and supervisors' teaching support, to provide students with an active and engaging learning experience, to increase students' chances of academic success, and to help foster a research culture in the tertiary education sector.

The objectives of the project will be as follows:.
• To offer research support for supervisors’ teaching and students’ learning of the process of conducting research
• To encourage students to engage in research activities and develop a passion for scholarly inquiry
• To enhance the quality of teaching and learning and help to foster a research culture within the Hong Kong tertiary education sector

The I-Cap portal will be developed from a ‘4-Is + Supervisor Support + Community’ framework to provide undergraduate students with a rich and distinctive research learning experience. This framework and the proposed design features are explained below and depicted in the figures in Appendices II and III.
4-Is: Integrated. The portal will serve as a single point of contact for all research support. Students and supervisors will thus be able to quickly acquire resources, support, and guidance for every stage of the research process by visiting a single, easily accessible platform. A well-chosen portal can ensure that all materials available for research support are integrated, coherent, accurate, and up to a particular standard. (Linn et al., 2015). 4-Is: Individualised. Students will have the ability to direct their own learning. The portal will enable students to study independently, revisit information as needed, and examine resources at their own pace. This personalised approach is expected to meet students’ diverse needs and facilitate their learning and skill development by providing them with information relevant to their research stage, research methodology of choice, and proficiency level. The topics and information will be divided into hundreds of micro-knowledge units with different learning styles catered for by a variety of resource formats, such as text-based guides, visual diagrams, video tutorials, interactive exercises, and downloadable templates. 4-Is: Interactive. A variety of learning resource formats, such as practice exercises, quizzes, step-by-step technical guides, and games, will allow students to evaluate their own understanding and provide and receive feedback, as well as will allow students to evaluate their own understanding, provide and receive feedback, and gain first-hand insights into how learning choices can result in rewards or other consequences that engage and motivate them to learn with fun. The feedback systems on the portal will allow students to submit peer comments and suggestions for improvement. 4-Is: Intelligent. The portal will provide support that is specifically designed to answer the issues and queries that students may have during the research process. An embedded AI-chatbot will provide automatic answers to students’ queries and advice and guidance such as learning paths, recommended knowledge units, conceptual diagrams, systematic research planning guides, decision trees for particular research designs and types, ethical informed consent form templates, and searchable validated instruments, with the aim of providing just-in-time support and guidance at every stage of the research process according to students’ needs. Pre-defined Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) serve as the basis for the AI-chatbot's responses, which help with knowledge base construction and training.

Supervisors’ support. Supervisors will find tailor-made resources to help them to mentor students at various levels, such as a library of validated instruments for key constructs and a comprehensive set of short videos on how to use advanced data analytical tools. The administration dashboard will allow supervisors to upload media resources, construct customised learning paths or courses by selecting relevant resources from the portal, and distribute materials to individuals or groups of students. A supervisors’ area on the administration dashboard will allow them to share teaching resources, experience, and best practices. The constant updating of resources and content by supervisors will strengthen and sustain the portal over the long term. Community. The portal will provide a virtual forum in which for students to discuss personal and research-related issues, challenges, and successes to foster a sense of community and provide social and emotional support. All things considered, the one-stop and just-in-time portal will offer efficiency, quality assurance, personalised learning, and convenience, enabling students to successfully build and improve upon their research competences.

Rigorous self-evaluation and quality assurance mechanisms will be adopted to assess, monitor, and improve the portal's overall quality, effectiveness, and usability. External experts will be invited to ensure that the portal covers all relevant topics and encompasses the study types commonly adopted by students in capstone projects, such as scoping reviews, systematic reviews, meta-analyses, secondary data analyses, and quantitative and qualitative studies. The experts will also be tasked with ensuring that the data is accurate, current, and comprehensive. The usage of the portal will be continuously monitored, and feedback will be collected regularly from users for enhancement and improvement. The one-stop I-Cap portal for research support will benefit undergraduate students, educators, academic support services, administrators, institutions, employers, and graduate programmes.

References:
Brew, A., & Mantai, L. (2017). Academics’ perceptions of the challenges and barriers to implementing research-based experiences for undergraduates. Teaching in Higher Education, 22(5), 551-568.
Buchanan, A. J., & Fisher, G. R. (2022). Current Status and Implementation of Science Practices in Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs): A Systematic Literature Review. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 21(4), ar83.
Hall, E., Bailey, E., Higgins, S., Ketcham, C., Nepocatych, S., & Wittstein, M. (2021). Application of the salient practices framework for undergraduate research mentoring in virtual environments. Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education, 22(1), 1-8.
Linn, M. C., Palmer, E., Baranger, A., Gerard, E., & Stone, E. (2015). Undergraduate research experiences: Impacts and opportunities. Science, 347(6222), 1261757.
Medley-Rath, S., & Morgan, R. (2022). Gaining confidence, experience, and knowledge as researchers among undergraduate sociology students. Teaching Sociology, 50(1), 28-38.
Nordsteien, A., Horntvedt, M. E. T., & Syse, J. (2017). Use of research in undergraduate nursing students' theses: A mixed methods study. Nurse education today, 56, 23-28.
Qualifications Framework. (2023). QF – Generic Level Descriptor (GLD). Retrieved from https://www.hkqf.gov.hk/en/KeyFeatures/levels/index.html
Senter, M. S., Spalter-Roth, R., & Van Vooren, N. (2015). Jobs, careers and sociological skills: The early employment experiences of 2012 sociology majors. February. Washington, DC: American Sociological Association.
Walkington, H. (2015). Students as researchers: Supporting undergraduate research in the disciplines in higher education. The Higher Education Academy, 1, 1-34.
Wilder, E. I. (2010). A qualitative assessment of efforts to integrate data analysis throughout the Sociology curriculum: Feedback from students, faculty, and alumni. Teaching Sociology, 38(3), 226–46.
World Economic Forum (2023). Future of jobs report 2023. Retrieved from https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2023.pdf

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Project Expenditure~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[Amount in HK$]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Project Income~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[Amount in HK$]

Grant Sought Under the Quality Enhancement Support Scheme (HK$): 4,407,282
Funding From Other Sources (HK$): 0
Total Project Value (HK$): 4,407,282

~~~~~~~~~~Duty list of manpower to be funded by this project~~~~~~~~~~

After the project is completed in three years, the student research support ‘I‐Cap’ portal will be
integrated into the partner institutions’ management to ensure its operation, annual maintenance, and
continuous updating and enhancement by the Centre for Innovative Teaching and Learning at Tung Wah
College, and Research Management Office at the School of Continuing Education, Hong Kong Baptist
University. The project team leader at Tung Wah College will be responsible for coordinating any interested
self‐financing institutions in using the portal.

To sustain the student research support I‐Cap portal (The amount is listed in the attached portal development quotation):
1. The portal website annual maintenance: $10,000.00/year/portal
2. Cloud‐based webhosting: $36,000.00/year/portal
3. iOS mobile app annual maintenance: $10,000.00/year
4. Android mobile app annual maintenance: $10,000.00/year
Total: $66,000.00/year/portal

These are the total costs to maintain the portal, and the mobile apps in full operation.
The portal design includes a backend content administration dashboard such that educators and
supervisors can continuously update the content to scale and adapt to meet the needs of different
institutions, disciplines, or educational contexts.