Date: Friday, 25 Nov 2016
Speakers: HKU, PolyU and CityU OPTIMUS Team โ David Gardner, Ken Lau, Kevin Pat, Jovi Chan, James King, Jane Robbins, Hebe Wong
For this HASALD gathering, all of the OPTIMUS Team were in attendance to present and discuss this new online project. The team shared the main goal of the Online Project for the Improvement of University Speaking Project (OPTIMUS) of providing Hong Kong tertiary students with an online, self-access resource for the improvement of their English speaking skills and related that OPTIMUS is the product of a large UGC-funded project conducted collaboratively by HKU, CityU and PolyU. OPTIMUS is centred on a database of more than 60 video exemplars of authentic best-practice speaking from expert and peer presenters. The user interface allows learners a large degree of independence to tailor usage to their preferred learning styles and needs. From this presentation participants learned about the key pedagogical features of the project and also discussed some of the logistical hurdles. The user interface was also demonstrated and its potential applications in self-access learning were also discussed.