Do you trust your calendar? Calendar synchronisation brings a lot of convenience to us nowadays. After creating an event in one application, you will see the event appearing in your calendar even though the calendar and the application are not developed by the same company. In Blackboard you can synchronise the Calendar with your Microsoft Outlook Calendar so that you can easily check your schedule from you Outlook Calendar. However, recently, it was found that the synchronisation between the Blackboard Calendar and the Outlook Calendar may contain a bug.

Integrate these student-centred activities into your synchronous online teaching to engage and motivate your students and keep them coming back. Some are designed to take place at the beginning or end of a live session, to build social presence, arouse students’ interest in the topic, or review what they have learned, while others are intended as main activities in which students engage more deeply with subject content.

Though the activities are generic and can be used in any subject discipline, where appropriate, examples are provided to illustrate how they could be tailored to suit a specific context.

1. Plan for an engaging session
2. Give students a reason to attend
3. Ensure all students can take part
4. Get off to a positive start
5. Facilitate interaction
6. Provide feedback on learning
7. Collect feedback on your teaching
8. Make clear the benefits of attending the session
9. Check the data
10. Reflect on your teaching

A significant amount of online learning and collaboration can be accomplished through discussion boards. Therefore, it is important that teachers are aware of how to facilitate meaningful discussions that engage learners and promote a cohesive online community.

Together with Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, Microsoft Teams provides a platform for teachers to conduct live online synchronous sessions with students. It facilitates real-time delivery of class activities and some degree of interaction with students.

Start creating your online course by using our template for rapid and pedagogically sound course design. The template has been populated with a pre-defined course structure and sample course elements that showcase the University’s Quality Standards for Online Teaching during face-to-face class suspension. You can customize the template to meet your learners’ needs.

This short guide provides you with essential ideas and references about Turnitin Feedback Studio and how to use it for online grading and providing feedback to your students.

This short guide introduces you to some key ideas for you to incorporate into your online learning and teaching. For further useful information and a full range of resources and tutorials, please visit https://www.polyu.edu.hk/elearning/teacher-support/teacher-blackboard-user-guide and https://www.polyu.edu.hk/elearning/teacher-support/bbseries for video tutorials.

Apart from creating and publishing teaching videos to students, uRewind can also be used to facilitate creation and submission of students’ video assignments.

This short guide introduces you to how to make the best use of Blackboard and other resources PolyU offers when subject assessment will be partially or fully switched to online mode. We hope that this guide can help you to find out the assessment format(s) that will work in your context and students, so that learning and teaching are not compromised if online is the preferred choice or during a time of class cancellation.

The ideas introduced in this guide mainly focus on PolyU’s Blackboard Learn and the software Respondus 4.0 which you can freely install on a home or office computer according to the campus-wide license.