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.

The selection panel has reviewed and decided to fund six proposals for the 2nd round of CoP Academic Advising Funding, which aims to support academic departments to run pilot projects on academic advising in order to promote quality academic advising services and activities in their departments.  Details of the successful proposals are as follows:

Dept/School	Leader	Proposed Activities
BME	Dr. Thomas Lee	Workshop: Orientation for Freshmen, Academic Advising topic workshops - Minor study, Overseas exchange and study concentration, Pun Choi Dinner, Team Building activity, Meeting with academic advisors and programme leader on subject registration
ITC	Dr. Kit-lun Yick	Workshop: ITC Academic Advising Orientation for Senior Year Admitted Students 2015/16, and Training Pack for ITC Student Ambassadors 2015/16
ITC	Dr. Joanne Yip	Project: Outstanding Study Plan Competition Visit: Site / Factory Visit for Senior Year Admitted Students
SHTM	Dr. Dan Wang	Workshop: Sharing and Reflection of Internship Experience - Implications for career development
SN	Dr. Zenobia Chan	Publishing a booklet of student experiences
SO	Dr. Chea-su Kee	Workshops: Characteristics of a successful optometry practice and White Coat Ceremony

On 31 March, three distinguished panelists, Mr. David Chan (Avnet Technology Solutions), Mrs. Georgina Chan (IAEE), Dr. Frankie Ng (ITC), with Prof. Eric Tsui (ISE) as the facilitator were invited to share their interesting perspectives about teaching smart people learn. Their everyday job is to deal with exceptionally smart people. They believe that when teaching smart people, we should:

1. Inspire not Impart;
2. Guide not Guard; and
3. Appreciate not Deprecate

During the session, participants also added their opinions that teachers also should:

1. welcome more challenging questions from smarter students;
2. encourage smarter students to challenge their professor by posing difficult questions;
3. encourage smarter students to form their own cluster and to synergize/learn among themselves;
4. give rooms for inventiveness for smarter students;
5. give credits to students’ contributions in class, and by doing so, develop their faith and confidence in the lecture, and from such point onwards, self-initiation and motivation are built for doing even better; and
6. contextualise the good answers/wisdoms of smart students with existing theories to affirm and to boost learning motivation.

In this session, the facilitators, Dr. Gilbert Chan and Mr. Alex Chan from ABCT, shared what they have learned from teaching a Service-Learning subject. They also shared and watched a short video of their subject with the participants. After that, participants joined in an open discussion for the following issues:
· the challenges in (i) farming communities in China; and (ii) interacting with the intellectually challenged in Hong Kong;· what students have experienced, learned and achieved in this subject; and
· lessons that the teachers have learned from teaching this subject

Dr. Andrew Furco, distinguished scholar on Service-Learning from the University of Minnesota, was invited to deliver an open lecture and two workshops at PolyU on 23-25 March. This activity was funded by UGC as part of the Collaborative Forum on Service-Learning and was co-organised by the Office of Service Learning (OSL), the Educational Development Center (EDC), and the Community of Practice (CoP) on Service-Learning. The whole activity was well received by the participants from PolyU and other institutions.

Details of the 3-day activity are as follows:
Open Lecture: Research in Service-Learning: Past, Present & Future 
Date: 23 March 2015 (Mon)

Programme synopsis: Service-Learning is now recognized as a highly effective pedagogical tool. The integration of community service into the academic curriculum in higher education is embraced wholeheartedly in many countries, and is gathering momentum in many other places all over the world. However, Service-Learning is relatively new to PolyU and Hong Kong. Participants of this lecture learnt more about the research in Service-Learning.

Workshop 1: Assessing Students in Service-Learning
Date: 24 March 2015 (Tue)

Programme synopsis: Objectively and accurately assessing students’ performance in service-learning subjects and projects is different from traditionally taught classroom-based subjects. Participants of this workshop had the opportunity to discuss and explore principles and practices for assessing students in service-learning subjects and projects.

Workshop 2: How to Write a Service-Learning paper for publication
Date: 25 March 2015 (Wed)

Programme synopsis: Service-learning is an evolving research area in its own right. Participants learnt about how to contribute most effectively to this growing field.

Supported by the CoP Member Development Fund, CoP member Mr. Joey Wu presented the paper ‘A Case Study on Transforming a Face-to-face Session into an Online Session at School of Hotel and Tourism Management’ (co-authored with Dr. Laura Zhou from EDC) at the 9th International Technology, Education and Development Conference (INTED2015) in Madrid, Spain in March 2015. For details about this conference, please visit http://iated.org/concrete3/session_overview.php?event_id=21.