The outbreak of the Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia (NCP) poses a challenge to the continuity of education and research. To support the University’s efforts to ensure that students continue to study during suspensions, ICTO has taken a series of measures and work to facilitate online teaching and learning, and provide remote support to faculty and staff:

For Working at a Distance

SSL VPN provides a secure way to access UM internal resources off-campus

In line with the university’s work-at-home, ICTO increased the concurrent access licenses of Virtual Private Network (VPN) service to allow more staff and students to securely connect to the school network over the Internet.

Virtual Desktop Service (VDS) provides a virtual computing environment for teaching and learning purposes

UM members can use their own devices such as PC, laptop or even mobile device to connect the UM virtual desktop outside the campus, so that members can handle administrative, academic and research works, and run specific software in virtual computer room 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus allows you to stay connected and work from anywhere

All UM staff and students can download and install Office 365 ProPlus on up to five personal mobile devices for free, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, etc.

For Learning at a Distance

UMMoodle and   Zoom provides personalized teaching and real-time interactive video conferencing

Most distance learning and academic guidance are conducted with UMMoodle and Zoom via the Internet. In response to growing demand, ICTO immediately expanded the server capacity and Internet bandwidth to ensure smooth e-learning activities, and purchased more Zoom Pro accounts with unlimited duration to meet the staff’s needs of online teaching.

ICTO keeps providing remote support via instant messaging, email, phone call, and Internet. Bulletins on tips and best practices on learning and flexibility were released.

For Communication & Collaboration at a Distance

Hotline & Voicemail allows departments keep communication with public

During the outbreak, ICTO assisted departments in setting up department hotlines, voice messaging and call transfer services to ensure that the university’s communication channels with the public were unimpeded.

Jabber allows users to access office extension off-campus

UM members can use the university’s internal number at home to answer or make calls during the work exemption period through the Jabber softphone.

For Sharing at a Distance

UMDrive provides on-premises cloud storage space for files sharing

UM staff can access, upload, synchronize and share the files individually or between different working groups on any device, anytime and anywhere.

For Online Health Declaration

Multiple online health declaration forms have been developed to quickly and effectively collect and evaluate the travel history and medical symptoms of all University members (including students, staff, contractors, outsourced workers, staff quarter residents).