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.

An e-learning course "Introduction to Academic Advising" will be launched in September 2014 to introduce basic concepts of academic advising, including its values, goals, theories and practice, to academic staff members who act as academic advisor or will take up the role. This course will be conducted on Blackboard and all academic advisors are welcome to register. For more information, please contact Bonnie Chim by email (bonnie.chim@polyu.edu.hk) or telephone at 3400 8240.

A total of 964 Year 1 students participated in the second round of survey of academic advising conducted from 30 January to 26 March 2014. Results reveal that the students expected academic advising to focus on:

1. Providing information about the career aspects of their programme of study (e.g. career path, internship);
2. Giving them advice when they encounter academic problems (e.g. study skills, adjustment to university life, poor academic performance, etc.);
3. Providing information about the academic aspects of their programme of study (e.g. curriculum, assignment requirements, study pattern, etc.); and
4. Discussing about their academic, career and/or personal goals and helping them make plans to achieve these goals.
   

Since April 2014, funding has been provided to support eight projects to promote and share good practices of academic advising in Schools/ Faculties/ Departments. The topics of these eight projects include: 1) Organising sharing sessions with freshmen; 2) Holding workshops on student’s academic study and career path; 3) Publishing videos and e-books on academic advising. For more information, please click here.

The Developing, Recognising and Rewarding Excellent Teaching CoP is considering ways to better recognise high quality teaching using evidence-based criteria. Our CoP is planning to have a wider range of teaching awards, for example for development of learning and teaching materials. We are also planning to provide mentorship and support for junior colleagues. Other initiatives include suggestions on innovations in learning and teaching. We would like to collect your views on this matter. Please send your ideas to ask.cop@polyu.edu.hk.

Developing, Recognising and Rewarding Excellent Teaching CoP is now being invited in the Learning and Teaching Committee (LTC). This will facilitate our input into learning and teaching processes and policies in PolyU, which aligns with our major aim to help revitalise teaching and instill a culture of sharing and continuous improvement in teaching and learning at PolyU.

Dr. Robert Wright, the co-facilitator of Developing, Recognising and Rewarding Excellent Teaching CoP, invited more than 30 stakeholders of PolyU, including employers, teachers, researchers and administrators, to share their views, opinions, advice and inspiring stories on an important question: “What will it take to educate the next generation of thought-leaders for a complicated world?” All their insights have been captured in a series of more than 30 short ONE-Minute videos. These videos will be available for viewing in mid-September. Stay tuned.

With the positive experience gained in the English CoP, Dr. Julia Chen, the facilitator of this CoP successfully secured further funding from the UGC competitive additional funding on teaching and learning related initiatives in the 2012-15 triennium. The inter-institution UGC project team includes Dr. Chen as the Principal Investigator and academic staff from CUHK, HKUST and CityU. The project has received a grant of $1,022,200, of which 70% is from UGC and EDB, and 30% from the four institutions participating in the project.

A consultation session was held on 5 August 2014 to help teachers write quality papers on service learning for the International Conference on Service-Learning to be held in November 2014. Teachers interested in submitting their papers came to the session, discussed ideas and received feedback from Dr. Josie Csete, the co-facilitator of Service-Learning CoP and Dr. Grace Ngai, Chair of the Sub-committee on Service-Learning subjects.

Professor Eric Tsui, the facilitator of the Using Blackboard LMS to Enhance Learning and Teaching CoP, was invited to deliver a talk at Adidas during their Global Week of Learning on 25 July 2014. Professor Tsui's talk was entitled "A connectionist approach to learning, innovation & knowledge transfer", covering, among others, the role of LMS, Personal Learning Networks, MOOCs, TED Talks etc. in seemingly converging corporate and academic learning environments. The talk was very well received. Photos can be found here. A webinar of the talk has been produced and can be replayed here.

Supported by the Member Development Fund provided by the CoP on Blackboard LMS, Dr. Voyce Li from ELC, a member of this CoP attended the R User Conference 2014 in UCLA from 30 June to 3 July 2014. R is a statistical tool which is command line and programmable; and the R User Conference is the main meeting of the R user and developer community. After the conference Dr. Li wrote a “tiny” R program to transpose data for a feed on Blackboard in order to facilitate adaptive learning that saves number of procedures to manipulate the data. She will continue to investigate the usage of the R at work and share what she learnt from the conference in the future.

Date: 30 September (Tue)
Time: 12:45-2:00pm
Venue: Research Lounge, 5/F, Pao Yue-kong Library

Most academics polarise the important practice of teaching and research into separate and distinct worlds – often rarely integrating them as complementarities in our pursuits towards better scholarship. This roundtable discussion brings together a distinguished lineup of three scholar/educators whom have successfully bridged this apparent divide. One thing they have in common is a passion for new ideas and for challenging our current taken-for-granted-assumptions in our scholarship of teaching, learning and research. This engaging and interactive session will showcase their experiences in “translating” their research into teachable moments and their teachable moments into research. 

These monthly roundtable discussions aim to create a more of a COMMUNITY of like-minded colleagues from our entire university to come together on a regular basis and discuss important themes that have the power to stimulate new ways of thinking and new ways of doing our practice of educating life-long learners.

We welcome researchers, teachers and administrations to join and discuss the topic “Researchers Hooked on Teaching and Teachers Hooked on Research”.

Please register HERE as seats are limited.

This event is organised by Community of Practice (CoP) on Developing, Recognising and Rewarding Excellent Teaching, in cooperation with Pao Yue-kong Library, Educational Development Centre and Student Affairs Office.