HKU CAES Annual Report 2022-2023

Communication-intensiveCourses Initiative Faculty or Course Type Number of courses Architecture 18 Arts 43 Business and Economics 6 Chinese Language Enhancement 37 Common Core 38 Education 30 English Language Enhancement 34 Engineering 2 Law 4 Medicine 9 Science 12 Social Sciences 6 Total 239 Number of CI-badged Courses per Faculty or Course Type In the 2018-2019 academic year, a teaching development grant funded the launch of the Communication-intensive Courses (CiC) initiative to support HKU students’ communication development. 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 the 2022-2023 academic year, 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 CiC Symposium was held face-to- face where teachers and teaching assistants from various faculties in HKU and an external keynote speaker, Dr. Ursula Wingate from King’s College London, shared their experiences of teaching written communication in their CI-badged courses. As of 14 September 2023, 239 communication-intensive courses had been badged. These courses are from various faculties: As the number of CI-badged courses is increasing, the CiC Peer Consultant Programme with the emphasis on visual and digital literacies was set up in the 2022-2023 academic year to meet the increased demand. Additionally, three online interactive micro courses were introduced during the same period. These courses cover skills across four literacies and are designed to enable HKU students to engage in self-directed learning at their own convenience throughout the entirety of their degree programme. In December 2022, the CiC Team was honored with the Outstanding Teaching Award in recognition of their dedicated contributions to students’ communication development. 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. ANNUAL REPORT 2022-2023 17 18 Centre for Applied English Studies