Dear students

Just a few updates about online T&L at HKU.

Add/drop

First, a reminder. We extended the add/drop period to 4:00pm on Friday, February 21. So the window remains open only for a couple more days.

Late drop

We understand that the current online learning experience, while good for some students, is not positive for everyone. We’re therefore offering UG and TPG students the opportunity to late drop any of their Semester 2 courses at any point until 11:59pm on Thursday, April 30. Please note that at present we’re not planning to offer students a pass/fail option for letter-grade courses. This is mainly because we have a system of GPA calculation and honours classification that relies on a solid base of data. If we switch too many courses to pass/fail, that base will start to erode. Provided we’re able to return to campus teaching on March 30, as scheduled, we’ll stick with letter grading for this semester.

Feedback

We’re eager to learn about your experience with online learning to improve our courses. We’ve therefore created a webpage for anonymous feedback: http://hku.to/onlinelearningfeedback. While we’ll read all the submissions from students, we won’t respond as we’re not requesting student identities and contact details. If you’d like to receive a response from us, you can send an email to hcm00101@hku.hk.

Engage!

Online learning is very different from campus teaching, but it does still provide students with multiple opportunities to engage with their courses. Please do participate as fully as possible in interactive classes. As you know, there are many ways to do that on platforms such as Zoom. Please do also keep in touch with your course teachers and academic advisers through any of the platforms they use. Teachers and advisers are happy to connect virtually with students.

Best wishes, Ian

Professor Ian Holliday

Vice-President (Teaching and Learning)
The University of Hong Kong