Joanne – Page 3 – Remote and home working tips

Support for Delivering Teaching Remotely

LTDS are providing information and resources on their Education Continuity web pages to support colleagues moving from on campus teaching to delivery of teaching materials online.

You’ll find detailed guidance on communication, lectures, seminars, accessibility and assessment policies for the current situation.

There is support for remote teaching delivery including a number of daily webinars and a twice daily online drop-in session to get real time help with delivering teaching remotely. These start Thursday 19 March and currently run until Friday 3 April.

The resources will continue to evolve and be added to, so check back regularly.

Stressed, scattered and distracted by email? Here’s a few tips that may help…

Set boundaries around you work email

Email is essential for remote working, but every email has a cost in time and attention. Here are some tips that may help:

Use your out of office message to set response-time expectations.
Update your email signature to include when and how you’ll answer emails.
If you need to send emails out of normal working hours (e.g. for childcare) be clear about what you need the recipient to do and when.
You can delay or schedule sending email messages
Is an email necessary? Try a chat message or a call in Teams, Skype or Zoom
Lead by example. If you send and respond to emails outside normal working hours, others will too. Discuss and set clear expectations.

Remember, you shouldn’t expect an instant response to email – particularly outside of normal office hours. See the useful email guides on the IT Service website.

Don’t get caught out! A handy refresher on how to spot the scammers

Unsettling times of crisis and confusion provide an ideal opportunity for email scammers to catch people off-guard.

Criminal organisations are targeting medical research facilities with Covid-19 themed phishing emails, fake mobile apps, and fake web advertising.

We’re also aware of a phishing email which suggests ‘you have a new document from OneDrive’. It appears to be sent by a member of the University or someone you know, but it’s not a genuine email and should just be deleted.

We’ve created a short cyber-security refresher quiz to help you spot the scammers. It covers the following topics:

Understand why we need to keep certain types of information secure
Identify the types of information we need to protect
Understand the potential impact of a data breach
Remember practical steps we can take to keep information secure

Take the cyber-security quiz now.

New resources to help you get started with Office 365 and Teams

We’ve just created several resources on the University Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways site with tips and guides for remote working using Office apps. Here are a few highlights from the guides:

Get started with Teams

Remote & Home Working using Office 365

Also don’t forget… Guidance for Academic and Teaching Staff

LTDS, the FMS TEL Team and NUIT have been developing some webpages to support colleagues with the move to remote delivery of L&T. These are now on https://services.ncl.ac.uk/digitallearning/educationcontinuity/

There’s also a daily series of webinars on different tools and approaches to remote delivery including twice daily online drop-in sessions – the details are at https://services.ncl.ac.uk/digitallearning/educationcontinuity/support/.

Covid-19 themed social engineering attacks against medical researchers

Criminal organisations are targeting medical research facilities with Covid-19 themed phishing emails, fake mobile apps, and fake web advertising.

Common themes include world outbreak maps, where to buy N-95 face masks, and communications fraudulently claiming to come from the World Health Organisation.

These emails, fake apps, and adverts contain ransomware that destroys critical research data, while also uploading that data to the dark web.

A UK medical research facility has already been hit by such an attack.

In our case, criminals are targeting home workers, who are no longer protected by the University’s firewall, and are using devices that may not provide the same level of protection as University devices.

We’ve published some guidance on how to protect yourself, and your important work, against these social engineering attacks and malicious software.

DirectAccess to University IT Services

When you’re using a University supplied, Windows 10 laptop to work remotely, DirectAccess allows you to log in to campus IT services and access your files. It starts-up automatically on your University managed laptop and runs in the background while you’re working.

With DirectAccess you can:

Access University IT Services and software
Access SAP services (scroll down to the bottom of the SAP login pad and select the service you require labelled ‘DirectAccess’)
Access your University files (H:Drive) and shared drives

Best Practice

You don’t need to download lots of files to your laptop, DirectAccess allows you to access and edit them in their original location
If you do need to download large files or data, please do it out of normal office hours so the service isn’t slowed for others.
Please only use one DirectAccess enabled device per person. Using multiple devices has an impact on the quality of the service.
For the best experience we recommend you use a wired network connection.

Other factors

Please consider the number of people accessing the internet in your household and the potential impact streaming/gaming/other online services may have on your internet connection. This may affect your DirectAccess experience.