During 17 and 18 November, I attended a conference at NTU entitled “Shaping Future @ Universities” which focused on technology-enhanced teaching. The meeting included a “holographic presentation” by Nobel laureate Carl Wieman, which alone would be worth the trip across Singapore!  A bonus feature was appearing along with the representatives from NUS, as I was part of a delegation representing the many facets of NUS and its technology. All of the other Singaporean universities were there too, with large teams in attendance. It was a great chance to get to know my colleagues from NUS better, and to hear them present some fascinating and innovating technologies they are using in their classes.

The meeting was opened by the Muhammad Faishal Ibrahim, Parliamentary Secretary for the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Social and Family Development, and then the President of NTU, Bertil Anderson. Both made the case that innovation in teaching as empowered by technology will enable us to enter a new age of teaching and learning. The metaphor of 3G to 4G was used, where the G’s in this case stand for Gutenburg (books), Gates (computers), Google (the interconnected web), and the 4th G would be our new era which allows us to transcend time and space with our technologies. This will enable students to learn anywhere – with a truly Global campus.

Carl Wieman gave a memorable talk – with a very odd technology that had him suspended on the stage next to a potted plant from Stanford, CA, which was beamed in and projected on a 45 degree slanting screen that was transparent. The stage had a local potted plant from Singapore, and a very friendly MC named Elizabeth who walked up to Carl’s holographic image on the stage and shook hands with him. It was kind of weird but it was fantastic to hear Carl’s talk entitled “A Scientific Approach to Teaching.” In the talk he recounted his experience as a professor and watching how students need to have “flexible, useful knowledge” instead of factual knowledge. Wieman realized that the wave of educational research had validated the new active approaches to teaching. Examples included large sections of a physics course taught by a mix of instructors and showing doubled learning in courses with active learning (Deslauriers, Scheiew, Wieman, Science 2011). He also recounted how at Cal Poly a physics course had a mix of instructors and documented massive shifts in scores from the Force Concept Inventory (a leading diagnostic in physics research for mechanics problems). After giving the overview of this new form of pedagogy, he attempted to determine what is valuable about it.

As Carl Wieman sees it, the benefits come from students solving tasks in class – using peer instruction, and a practice of thinking with guided feedback on how to improve. By completing tasks within a class with this feedback, students can generate mental models (or “construct knowledge) and can use feedback to give selection for which mental model is correct, enabling them to remove misconceptions. Carl Wieman also described his Teaching Practices Inventory – for assessing pedagogy in universities, and ways in which professors can implement technologies in their classroom to extend the learning with guiding feedback. For this simulations, like those he developed at PHET at U. Colorado Boulder are recommended.

Another amazing talk that day was from John Seeley Brown, one of the founders of the Xerox PARC research center. He discussed how students need a “blended epistemology” for “a world of constant change.” This requires not just content but skills and dispositions, and a form of learning that is contextual, participatory and collaborative. In Brown’s conception, students also need a chance to “regrind their conceptual lenses” – akin to Carl Wieman’s idea of working with feedback to adopt conceptual models. Brown also strongly advocated play as a way to foster learning, and spoke of human evolution moving us from homo sapiens (“know”) to homo faber (“make”) and now to homo luden (“play”). In Brown’s conception, there would be a seamless connection between knowing, making and playing in education, enabling students to grow and to build new worlds in their learning.

The combination of inspiring talks by Wieman and Brown, the camaraderie with my friends from NUS, and the exciting energy of the conference made this meeting quite memorable!

We also had a nice tour of the NTU area known as “the hive” which included some great interactive spaces for students to have collaborative learning opportunities, and a very nice “library outpost” which was catered to relaxed and informal drop-in students. The outpost included a section on “what your professors are reading,” “100 films to watch before you graduate,” and comfortable bean bag chairs for the students.

On October 22, Dan Bernstein from the University of Kansas visited us at Yale-NUS College to discuss “What Does a C Grade Mean.”  Dan’s visit was an outgrowth of our campus opening symposium, and a visit he was making to NUS, where he was a visiting scholar in residence. Dan attended the Yale-NUS College campus opening symposium, and one of our faculty, Shaffique Adam, invited him to come to Yale-NUS to learn more about our new College and talk with the faculty and staff. Dan graciously agreed, and his topic was very timely, as Yale-NUS has been having many heated internal discussion about how to preserve instructor autonomy in grading, while providing transparent and consistent grading for students. We very much hope to escape some of the “grade inflation” that has afflicted most of the US institutions, and so Yale-NUS is taking grading very seriously.

Dan gave a very thoughtful talk which distinguished the various purposes of grading, which both serve to certify learning and to motivate learning. Some of the difficulties which arise in grading discussions come from the mix of frames in which we think of grading, which are sometimes in tension with each other. As Dan points out, grading performs an important function for society by certifying accomplishment. For many skills (airline piloting, surgery, etc) the public is served best not by distinguishing relative strengths within a class, but instead from being assured a consistent standard of competency from graduates.  From this could come a strong argument for “competency-based” grading, in which students may be given variable amounts of time to reach a standard level of competency.  Dan pointed out that our usual system is to have a fixed (somewhat shortened) span of time, and to have students race to reach varying levels of achievement within the finite time. This competitive style of grading can serve some interests of society, but very often convinces students of their lack of abilities, and can also turn out a cohort of students in which only a small minority are assured of the highest levels of competency.

As Dan described in a report to the Teagle Foundation (http://www.teaglefoundation.org/Resources/Archive/The-Teagle-Liblog?bid=1&nd=2/16/2010):

“Our course sessions typically proceed through content and skill measurement at a rate suited to the average of our student population, with the result that some students could easily learn more and faster while another set of students cannot keep up and fall further behind until they fail. More than 40 years ago two notable educators (Benjamin Bloom and Fred Keller) addressed this problem by developing systems of individually paced learning, asserting that learning foundational skills well is necessary for successful continued learning. Their slightly different systems supported students in repeating topics until well learned before moving on to the next (perhaps more advanced) topic. Students work through the course at different rates, demonstrating their learning at different times. In this way of thinking, a grade reports the final level of accomplishment of intellectual work, rather than the relative rate of learning among students. In principle, every student could learn all the content well and receive a grade signifying a high degree of understanding and skill. Grades sacrifice their service in differentiation in favor of certification of achievement.”

This tension between individually paced and competitive and normative grading schemes has not been resolved in most institutions in the US. At Yale-NUS College, our Centre for Teaching and Learning is working on writing up a thorough report of the different ideas behind grading schemes, and fostering discussions within our community so we can help find our own “grading culture” that both preserves instructor autonomy and discretion, but also serves the multiple requirements of an effective grading scheme – communicating clearly to the student about how well they have performed (and how they can improve) and certifying to society that students are accomplishing consistently excellent work when given high marks.

One very interesting highlight of Semester 1 was the NTU Pan Asian Liberal Arts meeting on 28-29 October. During the meeting, representatives from Hong Kong, South Korea, Macau, China, India, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore got together to discuss the new proliferation of interest in liberal arts and sciences in Asia. The meeting featured a number of very interesting talks from Presidents and Vice Chancellors from around Asia, including our Yale-NUS President, Pericles Lewis. Kenneth Young at CUHK gave a talk on liberal education and general education, and their very interesting year-long courses which are entitled “In Dialog with Nature” (an interdisciplinary science curriculum), and “In Dialog with Humanity” (an interdisciplinary humanities course). Like the Yale-NUS Curriculum, the courses blend ideas from East and West and offer an exciting synthesis of the key ideas from past centuries. Many of the speakers talked about the transition in ideas on education within Chinese culture, from Zhu Xi who in ancient times advocated a form of liberal arts, to Chairman Mao who wanted to integrate higher education with “productive labor.”

Anita Patankar from India’s Symbiosis University gave a great talk about how India is at “an important state in its history” that promises to be “tremendously amazing” or “tremendously scary.” She reviewed the history of higher education in India as it evolved from Tagore’s Vishwa Bharati towards the post 1947 goals of providing free education for everyone.  Anita pointed out the success of places like IIT, IIM and the research institutes within India TIFR, TISS, NCL, and RRI. However she said many of the other institutions left much to be desired, and students in India needed greater focus on working in teams, soft skills, communication, and cross-cultural understanding. Ultimately the development of improved higher education has the potential to transform Indian culture and improve civic life, and Anita is committed to this in her own institution, Symbiosis University. During the meeting I was able to discuss the possibility of Symbiosis hosting our third “Future of Liberal Arts in India” meeting in late May, and Anita indicated that this was of great interest to her and Symbiosis!

Additional talks by Da Hsuan Feng from U. Macao (a nuclear astrophysicist), Xiafeng Jin from Fudan University (a physics professor interested in history of astronomy), Steve Sung-Mo Kang (an electrical engineer; founding President of UC Merced, and now president of the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), highlighted the role of physics and science in leading new curriculum in Asian higher education. The blending of new technologies, science education and liberal arts in Asian higher education is very exciting, and promises to usher in a renaissance within Asian universities. The students will benefit, and as some of the speakers pointed out, Chinese tradition tells of how a “gentleman is not a vessel to be filled” and that education should create students who are “broad of spirit and intellectually agile” – clearly goals of a good liberal arts and science education!

During early Semester 1 (September 2015), NUS hosted a remarkable visitor, Anthony Bryk, who is the President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Improvement of Teaching. During his visit to NUS, he offered a master class, gave a public lecture and met with the NUS Faculty of Science. I attended all of these events, and learned about his concept of the Networked Improvement Community (NIC) as well as some of his user of improvement science he has been applying to helping improve teaching in the US public schools. These concepts are extremely powerful and can be applied to any organization or system. Tony described a series of principles that should be followed to employ Improvement Science to solve a problem. These principles include  1). Be problem-focused and user centered; 2). Attend to variability; 3). See the system; 4). Embrace measurement; 5). Learn through disciplined inquiry; and 6). Organize as networks. He then described each of these elements in detail, and gave examples of how Improvement Science is being used to improve mathematics instructions in the US. He described this process as one of knowledge synthesis, which brings together research, professional organizations, and system theory. As applied to education, it is important to recall his point that education is an “intensely personal and social activity.”

Within the workshop was a remarkable demonstration of systems theory, where he took half of the class, and had them stand up in front. He told the group up front to secretly choose two people and then maintain themselves to be equidistant from both of them. Immediately the mass of people began to move in an amazingly complex and chaotic dance – illustrating how often in organizations unstated rules and complex behaviors can come together. It was a great discussion when we noticed that even a small movement from one person caused a ripple effect with a big shift in the positions of all the group. It illustrated that there was no single person in control, and that the system was reactive – causing the chaotic behavior seen in some educational contexts!

The workshop next discussed Causal Systems Analysis, which enables you to identify the causes of a problem. The tool used is a “cause and effect diagram” which arises from asking the five “why” questions – all in an attempt to identify the cause of a problem while keeping any discussions of solutions to later. The diagram is sometimes called a “fishbone” diagram that identifies a problem, and then finds the multiple causes of the problem. For an example, Tony used a broken faculty development system in many K-12 public schools – where teachers can fail without good feedback. The problem comes from several “why’s” – not enough time to give feedback; admins are too busy; only 2 admins in a school; instructional coaches were not deployed since they were covering classes; this because the process for substitutes was not working. The question of asking “why” ends when you hit a process that is not working. This becomes a leverage point and one that can suggest the proximal cause of a problem rather than the root cause.

Once the problem is identified, Tony suggests asking “aim” questions. The first one is “what, specifically, are you trying to accomplish?  The second is what change can we introduce and why? and the third is how can we measure this change, and what change would we consider successful?  Tony also described how to create driver diagrams, where your goal is identified, and you label it with several (3-5) primary drivers that will be part of the solution, and secondary drivers that include specific strategies that are part of the solution.  This diagram should identify leverage points, give a graphic representation of the solution, and should illustrate “what is happening” based on evidence.

Once the improvement is started, the Improvement Science recommends an improvement cycle, which involves iteratively studying causes, assessing current system, developing improvement hypotheses, trying an improvement protocol, measuring outcomes, analyzing results, and then revising and refining in a second iteration. Seeing this system in action, and with Tony’s examples was really amazing, and I look forward to trying out some of these systems in my work at Yale-NUS College!

A group of people engaged in solving the same problem, using this system of Improvement Science, can greatly add to their efficiency by adopting the same framework, driver diagrams, and testable and measurable improvement protocols. As the group of institutions begin their work, they are able to make use of the variability in their communities, and from this cross section of individuals a more robust measure of the solution can be found, along with a great range of new ideas and insights from the larger community. This structured form of improvement is known as a Networked Improvement Community. The concept is one that in some ways can be likened to a community of practice, but the difference is that the group is focused on solving the same problem, with the same set of explicit assumptions and hypotheses. These NICs have been used in a wide variety of K-12 public schools and some community colleges, and it would be great to see if this sort of focused and structured form of inquiry can be adapted to higher education!

One exciting development from the semester is the creation of a network for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) at NUS. The network has been started during Sem. 1 of 2015, and includes leaders of Teaching Centers at the many excellent higher education institutions in Singapore – NTU, NUS, SMU, SUTD, SIM, SIT, and of course Yale-NUS College. I met with this group several times during the Sem. 1, and really enjoyed getting to know this interesting and diverse group. It includes Peter Looker from NTU, who has a long track record in Australia before leading his dynamic center at NTU, as well as Nachamma Sockalingam from SMU, Yong Lim Foo from Singapore Tech, and Eng Hong Ong from SUTD.  Johan Geertsema, the NUS CDTL director is leading the charge, and has not only convened several interesting discussions of our group but has also engaged the team at Lund University in Sweden and we together are discussing a course for Faculty Development Techniques for next academic year.

Johan Geertsema, the NUS CDTL director, and the NUS Associate Vice Provost Huang Hoon Chng arranged for a fantastic two day meeting on October 26, which included representatives from NUS (Alan Soong, Kiruthika Ragupathi), Lund University in Sweden (Katarina Martensson), University of Hong Kong (Grahame Bilbow and Trudi Chan), Hong Kong Poly (Angelo Ho), and U. Kyoto in Japan.  The group met for a day of discussions and presentations on a Friday and also a second weekend day for further strategizing about how best to develop SoTL in Singapore and across Asia.

Katarina Martensson and Dan Bernstein both gave talks during the day, and I took a LOT of notes and learned a lot!  Katarina is an expert on “communities of practice” and explained the theory and practice of these communities as they relate to both faculty development and curriculum redesign.  The interesting part of Katarina’s talk was that she was describing in many ways the very group we were assembling, and our community of practice is one that hopes to have a shared intellectual enterprise in developing a unique flavor of SoTL in Singapore and helping coordinate our efforts in faculty development in the coming months.  A few figures from her talk illustrate schematically how we are all connected in our efforts, and also that various models for fostering such connections can be applied to help accelerate development of innovations by “local champions” and dissemination and reinforcement of such efforts with carefully developed outside ties. The talk was just one of several amazing lessons in how universities can interconnect and can learn from each other.

(these slides are available online at: http://ctlt.ubc.ca/files/2010/08/Torgny-Roxa-PowerPoint-Presentation-11-28-08.pdf ). Further talks by Dan Bernstein were very instructive; Dan also came to Yale-NUS to meet with us and to give a talk on assessments and grading. A very exciting set of days!

Clearly one of the biggest events from last semester – perhaps of the year – was our official campus inauguration – on October 11 and 12, 2015. We were joined by 40 University Presidents – including those from Yale, Oxford, NYU, Shanghai Jiao Tong, University of Hong Kong, Pomona, Wesleyan, Vassar and many, many others. The Yale Corporation, Richard Levin, the NUS President Chor Chuan, and other supporters of Yale-NUS were all attending, and the energy and support was very gratifying. I spent most of the 2014-15 year helping plan the event with a small task force that included Fiona Soh, Casey Nagy, and Jenifer Raver, and it was wonderful to see it all come together so nicely!  The Public Affairs office had made impeccable arrangements for the various venues and meals, and our program included a full day of talks on Sunday October 11 which explored The Future of International Liberal Education (Andrew Hamilton from Oxford gave a great talk!), and discussed the founding of Yale-NUS College (with a panel that included Richard Levin and Chor Chuan Tan). I had a chance to open up the event with a short 5 minute speech, and also to introduce our President, Pericles Lewis, and help keep the various sessions on time. The NUS President Chor Thuan Tan wrapped up the session with a great talk, and we spent the next day enjoying the spectacle of our campus opening. This included a ceremonial precession of academics into our performance hall, and address from the Prime Minister of Singapore, student dance and music performances, and a series of talks and gift exchanges. The final segment was to dramatize the opening of the campus with a small model on the stage, which led to a wonderful video of the construction of Yale-NUS College (imbedded below). Those of us who have been working so hard on the new Yale-NUS College found the video very inspiring and touching!  It showed the dramatic building of an entire campus in two years, which was paralleled by a similarly rapid construction of a curriculum, and an academic culture. What an exciting weekend – and more such adventures are coming!

As part of the Yale-NUS College Week 7 program, I led a short course during late September 2015 entitled “The Ancient and Modern Chinese Universe.” With a team of 20 students, and a fearless staff member from CIPE, Charlotte Evans, we are visited Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing, and explored the ancient and modern cosmology of China, which includes visiting the Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, ancient observatories such as the Beijing and Purple Mountain Observatories, and the Shanghai Sheshan Observatory, with the largest telescope in Asia – a 65-meter steerable radio telescope. Our modern component included riding bullet trains, visiting astrophysics research centers and political think tanks, and analyzing downtown Shanghai from a cosmological perspective, and meeting students and faculty at NYU Shanghai. This sort of thing is really one of the amazing parts of being out here in Singapore at Yale-NUS College, and a very exciting chance for me to learn more about China and ancient astronomy with students!

Some of the highlights of the trip included – a meeting with NYU Shanghai students, measuring skyscrapers in Shanghai with a theodolite app on ipads, and a laser rangefinder, riding the Chinese high speed trains, visiting the Shesan Observatory, with its nearly 200 year old tradition of astronomy begun by Jesuits, the visit to the Beijing Observatory and its 500 year old instruments, the Purple Mountain Observatory with its original bronze instruments from the 1400s, and a chance to see Asia’s largest telescope – the 65-meter Shanghai radio observatory. During our visit we also got to see a press conference for China’s new Dark Matter satellite, tour the science labs for the Purple Mountain Observatory, hear a talk about China’s geopolitics and linguistics from David Arase (a former colleague from Pomona, now at the JHU Nanjing center), and from Neil Kubler (Director of the JHU Center). It was also wonderful exploring China with our amazing Yale-NUS students, and enjoying dumplings, large hot pot dinners and other Chinese food. We had an amazing evening at the Beijing Temple Hotel where a Turrell exhibit allowed us to watch the sunset in a specially constructed room with a square portal viewing the sky.

One of the first “site visits” taken during the 2015-16 academic year was a visit to SUTD, a new university that is a partnership with MIT here in Singapore. The institution features a very interesting new curriculum, co-developed by MIT faculty and local SUTD faculty. It offers an interdisciplinary science and engineering education, and a top-flight education for Singaporean students interested in STEM. I visited there with our Associate Director of our Yale-NUS CTL, Nancy Gleason on 31 August. We met with Professor Pey Kin-Leong, Associate Provost of Education, and Allan Chan, the Associate Programme Director for Curriculum planning. Allan and Kin-Leong are long-time employees of SUTD, starting back in 2010 as some of the first people hired. They explained how tight-knit their graduating students were – of 130 students, nearly half were getting married!  Their campus has a very interesting schedule which includes 2 summer sessions, and which has a curriculum that builds from a 1-D disciplinary view point, to 2D projects that integrate Math, Chem, and Physics, and then a “3D” design class, in which the four “pillars” of the SUTD curriculum are brought together, and finally a “4D” session where the learning from SUTD students is integrated with the outside world.

(image from Otto, et al, “Integrated 2D Design in the Curriculum: Effectiveness of Cross-Subject Engineering Challenges” presented at the 2014 ASEE Annual conference)

The entire curriculum of SUTD is based on the idea of “pillars” which correspond to four areas of study. These include Architecture and Sustainable Design (ASD), Engineering Product Development (EPD), Engineering Systems and Design (ESD), and Information Systems Technology and Design (ISTD). They have also added Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) and integrate this to the program of study in some of the 2D work. The schedule is built into what is called a “Freshmore” period of three terms, and then the 3D and 4D sections come afterwards. Like other startups there is a tangible energy and excitement about SUTD. They are proud that their students build exciting things in their courses – an E&M course includes building a radio receiver, which can double as a radar. The faculty come from all over the world, with 1/3 from Singapore, and the others from around the world. One of the perks of the SUTD faculty job is a chance to spend time and collaborate at MIT, and work closely with a very interesting and international faculty. The SUTD has a “pedagogy day” where faculty share some of their new innovations. They are also closely working with the CREATE/SMART group in Singapore, and with some key faculty from MIT visiting Singapore. On our way out we visited their very impressive “Fab Lab” which includes literally dozens of 3D printers, engravers, and large spaces where students can build and test out some of their many creations. A very interesting day indeed – and we will look forward to further connections between Yale-NUS and the SUTD!

Now that the new year and semester are here, I am going to be posting a recap of some of the interesting events of last semester. Things were so busy I was not able to keep up with blogging!  The basic idea was that I managed to launch our new Centre for Teaching and Learning, while coordinating our very large Foundations of Science core curriculum class. This involved 8 instructors, and about 160 students. On top of that, I managed to take a certificate course in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), plan and implement our October Yale-NUS Campus opening, plan and implement a pretty cool “week 7 trip” to China entitled, “The Ancient and Modern Chinese Universe,” attend a number of meetings at Caltech, NTU, SUTD, NYU Abu Dhabi, and also plan and implement a project known as “Envirolabs Asia” which included roving about central Borneo with 8 faculty from Claremont, 5 from Yale-NUS, and 20 students. A few other things happened, as the subsequent blog posts will indicate! Enjoy!

A rainbow, viewed about 3 hours away from Miri, Sarawak, during our Envirolabs Asia trip in Jan. 2016. We enjoyed the rainbow for a while while waiting for help after our flat tire!  One adventure after another!

With the end of the Fall semester, I now finally have a bit of time to add some postings for the media platform! Suffice it to say, it has been a busy and very interesting semester – and so busy in fact that I have fallen a bit behind in my postings!  Unlike many of these “media platforms” my goal is to not necessarily document the moment by moment happenings of the semester and work life but instead use the platform as a vehicle for reflection. The educational research has shown how valuable structured reflection can be for learning, and this site is my way of reflecting on experience – and sharing some of the amazing adventures in Singapore with a wider audience.

One aspect of the end of the semester different this year than last is that the end – really was not an end. In other years, I would hand off my grades, and then be off for several weeks – completely unbothered by anyone and free to pursue research, attend a conference or even go on long bike rides. This semester since I have responsibilities coordinating our large Foundations of Science class (with 170 students and 8 professors), directing a Teaching and Learning Center, planning a group of visitors to Yale-NUS next semester, and organizing a conference on innovative undergraduate education at Yale University in June 2016, and a few other projects. This has meant that instead of coming to a complete end, the semester just sort of slowed down a bit as I could then catch up on my many projects. Such is the life of being an administrator I suppose!

Things however have slowed down enough so that I could catch up with my unused painting lessons. This enabled me to finish one piece which in the spirit of “reflection” is shown below. The painting is of a very important site for our family, called Long Lake, near Mammoth Lakes in the California high Sierra. I think having a bit of time for painting too is part of being a fully productive scientist – the way in which I can use other parts of my brain, think about color, and feel some of the lighting and feeling of painting is really a great way to regenerate. I will fill in with some other postings about the events during Fall Semester – this includes the Yale-NUS Campus opening, a number of very interesting meetings on Teaching and Learning with amazing people at NTU, NUS, and SUTD, a week 7 trip to China with a group of Yale-NUS students, and some exciting developments in our Foundations of Science course. More on that later – in the meantime, enjoy the painting!