Welcome to the e-bulletin of Communities of Practice (CoPs), where you will be able to catch up with our most updated events and information of the five CoPs in PolyU.

Prof. Eric Tsui, facilitator of the Using Blackboard LMS to Enhance Learning and Teaching CoP and member of Developing, Recognising and Rewarding Excellent Teaching CoP, conducted a workshop on February on the use of a cloud-based Personal Learning Environment & Network (PLE&N) for supporting peer-based and lifelong learning. PLE&N functions as a semi-automatic online forum with updates from a pre-selected set of targeted sources.

Through the use of PLE&N, teachers, students, graduates and industry practitioners can collaborate, share and engage in a co-learning environment and not be bound by the time frame of an academic semester.

After 4 years of implementation, PLE&N has been used by over 1,500 PolyU students. Even after they have graduated from the university, many students continue to use it as a truly lifelong learning tool. 

The PLE&N earned PolyU the first place in Asia at the Wharton QS Stars Awards 2015.

This workshop was co-organised by the CoP on Developing, Recognizing and Rewarding Excellent Teaching, the CoP on Using Blackboard LMS to Enhance Learning and Teaching, and EDC.

In this roundtable session on 23 February, with Dr. Robert Wright as the facilitator, three distinguished panelists, Ms. Valentina Chan (CBS), Ms. Elvy Pang (MM), Mr. KC Tsang (SD), were invited to share their insights on the topic of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. The facilitators shared their experiences in the "Becoming a Scholarly Teacher" workshop series, organised by the Educational Development Centre in 2015, and their plans on how to take their careers to a new level. The discussion in this roundtable session gave participants powerful inspirations on how to improve their teaching and professional development.

This activity was co-organised by CoP on Developing, Recognising and Rewarding Excellent Teaching, EDC, Pao Yue-kong Library and Centre STARS.

This workshop conducted on 22 February introduced aspects of vocabulary knowledge that academic writers should pay attention to and tools that these writers can use in order to select words correctly and effectively when writing academic texts. The Powerpoint slides are available on the CoP website.

The workshop was jointly organised by the CoP in Enhancing Students’ English Abilities, the UGC-funded inter-institution project "Professional Development in Enhancing English Across the Curriculum", and EDC.