The City University of Hong Kong is the first educational institute in Hong Kong to have the foresight to understand the importance and role of technology in advancing higher education. In 2000, CityU was the first to establish the position of the CIO and its associated Office of the CIO. Dr J T Yu was appointed the first CIO of CityU. Since then, CityU has made numerous advances in the use of IT to support teaching, learning, research and administration.
CityU is the first local university to implement an ERP system. The Oracle-based Banner system was first implemented for students in 1997. This was followed by the Human Resources module and the Advancement module, both went live in 2001. A personalized Web portal was also launched in 2002 to further streamline workflow and the access of information for the entire university population.
In 2005, CityU adopted the Blackboard Academic Suite as the central unified e-learning platform to further strengthen the University’s efforts in providing state-of-the-art tools to support a wide variety of teaching approaches and learning needs.
CityU is also among the first higher educational institute in Hong Kong to provide total wireless access to all its staff and students. In 2008, it made laptops more affordable to students through an innovative student notebook scheme.
In 2010, the University made available a suite of cloud-based services to staff and students through its launch of Google Apps for Education and Microsoft Live@edu for CityU, thus encouraging a new age of collaboration and knowledge sharing on the cloud.
In early 2011, CityU was the first in the Greater China region to launch Blackboard Mobile Learn. Together with other supporting mobile apps, CityU made anywhere anytime mobile-learning a part of its standard e-learning service offering. The University further encouraged the use of mobile devices and tablets through various college or department-level ownership schemes, with the entire School of Law deploying iPads in 2011.
To further enhance our sustainability and environmental efforts, in 2011 the University adopted Documentum as the platform for its Paperless Campus initiative to minimize paper usage and carbon footprint as well as improve work efficiencies through automated workflows.
In 2011, CityU redesigned all its top-level websites, roughly one hundred in total, and upgraded the technology platform to modern HTML5/CSS3, allowing all websites to be easily read by different types of devices including smart phones and tablets, as well as greatly improving usability and accessibility. This major redesign effort unified its online branding to project consistent brand image across all websites. CityU recognizes the growing importance of mobile devices and is the first University to implement mobile-friendly websites across all departments and units.
