Special Remarks

By Dr. Tracy Zou
I have been spending an extremely long time on drafting this message to you because I hate to say ‘Goodbye’. I am saddened to let you know that this is the final issue of CoP – ITL Buzz – the official e-newsletter that connects us on the latest development of internationalisation of teaching and learning across the four partners institutions. As we are approaching the end of this three-year project that supports the growth of our community, we need to draw a conclusion to some of our services, including CoP – ITL Buzz.

Fortunately, there are several exciting news that I would like to share with you at this final stage of the project. We have confirmed that our finale event – a virtual international conference entitled: Online Internationalisation – Meeting the Challenge of Student Mobility in a Global Pandemic will be held on 13 November 2020 (Friday). We particularly picked the focus on online internationalisation rather than the broad internationalisation work we have been working on over the past three years because we see enormous challenges emerging as COVID-19’s impact has spread around the world. The landscape of higher education and the internationalisation agenda were dramatically changed. Due to the significance and timeliness of the topic, we will involve multiple stakeholders such as students and teachers, keynote speakers, and senior leaders in our universities in the discussion as well as draw insights from our members’ own explorations. Please do mark the date and join us!

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank all of you as our members to stay connected with us. Due to the previous social unrest and the current pandemic outbreak, we lost many opportunities to meet in person. Some of our scheduled events were cancelled. Despite all of these constraints, CoP – ITL is still growing. We now have 114 members from 10 countries. We have also developed rich resources including 80 case examples, 14 briefings, two journal publications, and many conference presentations (mostly made by our members through their pilot projects). See our recourse library for the latest development: https://www4.talic.hku.hk/cop-itl/resource-library/.

Another exciting news was that the University of Hong Kong has recognised our team’s outstanding service in terms of creating a collegial community of practice and awarded us as a finalist of the Professional Services Award 2019. My colleague Vienne has provided more elaboration in her article entitled This is the Community that We Built Together.

To end this message, I would like to express my personal gratitude to every one of you, including our editorial team – Ms. Vienne Lin, Dr. Beatrice Chu, Dr. Lisa Law, Ms. Tiffany Ko, and Ms. Nicole Lai. When our team was established, many questioned us: “How are you going to build a community?” Now three years later, I think we have found some of the essential ingredients to community building: collegiality, connection, crediting members, crossing boundaries, and ultimately creating values. CoP – ITL means a lot to me. I am still actively looking for ways and funds to sustain it. This is not really a ‘Goodbye’ but a pause for a re-focus. I have faith that we will see one another soon.