As I announced in my recent State of the University Address, SMU will launch the President Incentive for Blended Learning (PIBL), an educational research fund, to promote and recognise a scholarly, evidence-based approach to blending seminar-style with online teaching and learning at SMU. The PIBL fund, amounting to a total of $300,000, is funded by the President’s Office and will be managed by the Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTE). CTE will soon announce further details of the PIBL fund and the application process. The Deans and I strongly encourage all our faculty members to apply for the fund to advance our SMU pedagogy, and engage as well as inspire our new generation of learners.
We all know that our students are learning in a very different way than the more senior amongst us used to do. The impact of technology on learners entering university shouldn’t be underestimated. Sophisticated Info-comm technology penetrates daily life at an accelerating rate. Students entering University today saw the first smartphone when they were 6 and may have been using an iPhone when they were 12. Our next wave of students will include many who used the iPhone from when they were 8. Those who are currently in primary school - well iPhones, Facebook, twitter existed even before they were born.
Increasingly, each cohort of 'digital natives' entering a university for a Bachelor’s degree will expect that their learning experience will build upon the competencies and IT literacy they have grown up with. Such competencies will include the ability to acquire knowledge from the internet, to collaborate online synchronously and remotely, etc.
Many Universities scramble to adapt curricula to be more in-step with rapidly changing expectations of employers. We may need to begin questioning more seriously “How much more responsively should Universities monitor and adapt to the changing profile of the students they enrol?"
Therefore I am convinced that we need to experiment more at SMU with ICT to support the learning environment. SMU’s pedagogy is in essence about interaction, mostly face-to-face. But even that face-to-face interaction is changing: earlier on it was more in an active class environment, nowadays we use more often project work and experiential learning combined with on-line modules.
It is a real challenge and opportunity for SMU faculty to experiment with new approaches that combine in-class activities with on-line support systems. Some of these on-line systems are readily available. We can use some of the modules and courses that are available through Coursera or others. But we will also have to develop our own proprietary support systems and modules.
It is for that reason that I made a special budget available. I hope that the experiments and innovations for which our faculty asks for support will also be multidisciplinary in nature.
Finally I hope that with such new courses and with these pedagogical innovations we will also develop better learning analytics. Such analytics should help the student to determine better what his or her progress is towards achieving their learning objectives.
Professor Arnoud De Meyer
President, Singapore Mangement University
