Back to School Online

Steven Wong, Assistant director (IT Infrastructure)

A warm welcome to you all for the new academic year, especially to all our new students, faculty and staff.  Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this is a very special academic year which starts with a solely online teaching mode.  Here we would like to highlight a few major IT areas that you may need to know, including what ITSC has worked on to prepare for this “New Normal” paradigm:


  • Online Teaching – you can conduct online learning/teaching via the Zoom online meetings solution, and students are able to join an online class session directly from the University e-Learning platform that runs on the Canvas solution.

  • Virtual Computer Barns – even though our students may not be able to visit the physical computer barns (PC labs) for access to the academic software and programming environment, they can still access our virtual computer barns for such purpose from their own device.  We will be rolling out shortly cloud-based virtual PC lab service for class-based concurrent PC lab sessions.

  • Accelerated Network Access from Mainland – special network speed-up is arranged by setting up acceleration proxy for users accessing the e-Learning platform and HKUST web sites from mainland to alleviate the slow access performance.

  • Virtual Private Network (VPN) Access – our VPN services capacity is augmented to cater for anticipated increase in secure remote access for off-campus users for connection to departmental services that are restricted from outside access, or staff’s office machines.

  • Service Desk supplemented by Online Chatbot – as you may not be able to come in person to our Service Desk for assistance, we have enhanced our IT Support Chatbot system to cover more service areas to provide automated machine-based response to your enquiries.
  • Work From Home (WFH) for Faculty/Staff – Over the past months, many colleagues had to work from home.  ITSC has taken this opportunity to review how we could do some of our daily office tasks during the WFH period.  We had now provided the flexibility for University switchboard calls as well as our Service Desk support helpline to be answered from home. 

 
ITSC has prepared an “IT Survival Guide” (student version / staff version) for you which highlight the major IT areas that you need to know.  The guide will include quick pointers to essential IT productivity tools like Zoom, Microsoft 365 software suite (Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, etc.), some security guidelines for working off-campus, and how to get help if needed.  We think the guide will be particularly useful for all our newcomers. 
 
Thank you for your attention and wish you all a fruitful and fulfilling academic year!