EN210905-HKU-CAES-Annual-Report_2021-22-V03-0222

COMMUNICATION- INTENSIVE COURSES INITIATIVE CAES WORK In the 2018-2019 academic year, a teaching development grant funded the launch of the Communication-intensive Courses (CiC) initiative to support HKU’s existing communication agenda. This is an institutional project involving the Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL), the Centre for Applied English Studies (CAES), and the Common CoreOffice. A communication-intensive (CI) course is an HKU undergraduate course that consists of a syllabus with components that explicitly develop communication-related knowledge, skills and attributes. It also specifically develops at least two out of four communication literacies: oral, written, visual and digital, with 40% of the course grade assigned to communication-related assessment tasks. On completion of a CI course, students receive a CiC badge which is visible in the Academic Achievement Profile (AAP) and the HKU mobile app. In 2020-2021, a number of professional development activities took place in order to promote CiC to teachers who may wish to badge their courses and provide professional development to current CiC-badged teachers. Our most popular event is the CiC Course Design Workshop which runs every month. In this workshop, teachers are given an overview of the principles of a CI course. They also have an opportunity to redesign their courses to embed communication teaching and learning. In addition, three summer workshops were organised with each featuring written, oral, or digital literacy. Guest speakers were invited to deliver these workshops. The events for 2020-2021 culminated with the Communication-intensive Courses Symposium held online where teachers from various faculties in HKU and also external speakers shared their experience teaching visual communication in their CI courses. As of 7 September, 2021, there are 103 communication-intensive courses that are in various stages of the badging process. These courses are offered from various faculties. In the future, we hope to continue to badge courses, to build a community of practice for CiC teachers and to promote the teaching and learning of communicative competence at HKU. As the initiative further develops, we are hoping to work with students who are taking or have taken a number of CiC courses. Number of CI-badged courses per Faculty or Course Type Faculty Number of courses Architecture 3 Arts 4 Business and Economics 2 Chinese Language Enhancement 9 Common Core 28 Education 8 English Language Enhancement 34 Law 3 Medicine 5 Science 3 Social Sciences 4 Total 103 CAES WORK 21 20