Thank you for taking the time to have a look and go through things. No need for in-depth feedback, the two books are over 400 pages long :) 

Yes, I've been trying to catch up with the behavioral science/JDM/Social psychology folks who do EA, and have signed up to almost everything I saw on the topic. I am learning a lot from that.

We will definitely make an official preprint and share everything with the community. I would rather invite other to comment on the Google Docs than post permanent copies on the EA forums, because this is all work in process and we are figuring things out throughout the semester. Once they submit their final copies, I'll try and make that a bit more official with a new post, and will then aim to make this into more of a community effort inviting the EA members to become our collaborators/coauthors, which is our usual way of doing things.

Thanks, Geoffrey, I actually saw your syllabus on the EA forums and  used some of that, thanks for sharing that with the community, it helped me think more about what I wanted to do with our course and inspired some of the directions. Please do feel free to build on that. Would be happy to see what you come up with, if you're willing to share back.

Actually, all of the lectures are recorded (link), though most times you can't really hear the students very well because they don't have a mic so I sometimes cut that out, but you can definitely hear my questions and reactions to what they're saying. It can give you an indication of the kind of interaction we have in the classroom. 
Doing classroom engagement and discussion is a bit tricky in our cultural context, it has been easier in other places I've been to. It takes  a while for the students to feel comfortable with the possibility of making a mistake or questioning the professor, but usually somewhere mid-semester some key students overcome that and then class engagement become a bit easier. 

I don't know about other cultural influences, but what I can say for sure is that in term of ability and execution the students I've taught at HKU are some of the most remarkable students I've encountered. What we've achieved together in the last 4 years is nothing short of remarkable, they have exceeded my expectations in every step of the way (example of us completing 120 replications and extensions of classic findings in JDM: https://mgto.org/core-team/).  I am hoping that we'd be able to do similar things with the EA directions, we'll know by the end of the semester if this realigned paid off and what students felt about it. Change and uncertainty are always a bit difficult with students who sometimes want a clear idea of how to get a high grade and the investment involved, so I'm hoping there are enough side-benefits to what we're doing here to compensate for having less of that with me this semester as we figure things out together.