Conference PaperPDF Available

Progress of the ICOSA project: Findings of the needs analysis

June 2012

Conference: Research into Practice in the Four-year Curriculum

Project: ICOSA Project

Authors:

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

City University of Hong Kong

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

The presentation reports the progress of the Inter-university Collaborative Online Self-Access (ICOSA) project: a project for sharing and developing online self-access English language learning materials. It covers the research-into-practice issue of the needs analysis stage of the project. The project was planned in 2011 and started in early 2012. The five participating Hong Kong tertiary institutions spent the first three months of the project conducting an analysis of the needs of their students for online self-access materials. This was followed by a survey of existing materials to find out what was already available to fulfil these needs, and what materials could be modified in order to do so. Needs which are not met by suitable materials are now being prioritized and materials will be developed. Project materials will be collected and shared in a repository. In addition, a tagging and indexing system will be used in order to help project participants find materials in this repository. In the presentation the results of the needs analysis and the survey of the existing materials will be described, as well as future plans. The presentation should be of interest to academics in need of elearning self-access materials to suggest to their students.

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