HKU-CAES-Annual-Report_2021-22

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 Core Office. 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-badged course, students receive a CiC badge which is visible in the Academic Achievement Profile (AAP) and the HKU mobile app. In 2021-2022, 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 CI-badged teachers. The 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-badged course and guidelines on how to convert their course to a CI-badged course. In addition, two Join-the- Conversation events were organised on enhancing writing skills and creating videos that successfully communicate ideas and have an impact on the audience. Guest speakers and HKU teachers were invited to deliver these workshops. The events for the 2021-2022 academic year culminated with the CiC Symposium held online where teachers and teaching assistants from various faculties in HKU and an external speaker shared their experiences of teaching oral communication in their CI-badged courses. As of 9 August 2022, there were 156 communication-intensive courses that are in various stages of the badging process. These courses are from various faculties. In the future, we hope to continue to badge courses, build a community of practice for CiC teachers and 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 CI-badged courses. COMMUNICATION-INTENSIVE COURSES INITIATIVE Number of CI-badged courses per Faculty or Course Type Number of courses Architecture 3 Arts 7 Business and Economics 6 Chinese Language Enhancement 33 Common Core 34 Education 18 English Language Enhancement 35 Law 3 Medicine 5 Science 6 Social Sciences 6 Total 156 CAES WORK ANNUAL REPORT Centre for Applied English Studies 14 13