On November 22, CMC President Hiram Chodosh gave a talk at the LKY School’s Bukit Timah campus. His talk was entitled “Strategic Innovations in Global Higher Education” and a group of us from Yale-NUS College attended his talk and discussed these ideas with President Chodosh. I have known Hiram Chodosh for many years, and was especially […]

Later in the conference we heard some very interesting talks about pedagogy – including a discussion of what is “Beyond MOOCs” and a panel discussion on flipped classes, among other topics. Below is a summary of those talks. One notable talk was by Marnie Hughes Warrington from the Australian National University (ANU), about “Beyond Disruption: […]

I was invited to attend the Association of Pacific Rim Universities Education and Research Technology Forum, on 17-18 November 2016, both representing NUS and Yale-NUS. The meeting had a theme of “Sustainable Technology and Learning Across Institutional Collaborations,” and brought about 80 educational leaders from the APRU Universities to a meeting at University Town, NUS […]

On November 16, the Provost of NUS convened a day of talks on Technology in Higher Education, which featured a wide range of presentations on tech-enhanced teaching, use of virtual reality in classes, and online education. It was a great way to learn more about the innovations at NUS and some of the new NUS […]

During the U21 meeting in Birmingham, we were given a talk by Graham Gibbs, as part of the “expert evidence” for the Universitas 21 group. We were convened to develop a position statement on the role of teaching within a research intensive university, and I was representing NUS as part of my work with the […]

One of the joys of my recent semester has been exploring the Chilean night sky – from the comfort of a classroom in Singapore, using the Las Campanas Remote Observatory (LCRO). This system, developed by a fearless crew of entrepreneurs and amateur astronomers in California, opens up the night skies of Chile to our Yale-NUS […]

From October 26-28, I was part of a delegation from the National University of Singapore attending a meeting at Birmingham University, entitled “What is Teaching Excellence in a Contemporary Research-Intensive University?” The meeting was convened by the Universitas 21 Network, a global coalition of leading research-intensive universities from across Asia, the US, Africa and Europe. […]

As part of the Singapore UN World Space Week (http://www.worldspaceweeksg.org/), I gave a talk at the Singapore Science Center entitled “Chasing Cosmic Explosions” that describes which describes supernovae, gamma ray bursts, and the search for optical counterparts of gravitational wave sources. This also describes the emerging global network of telescopes that our group at Caltech […]

As part of the NUS Teaching Academy,  we receive briefings and advise the leadership at NUS. On September 22 we received a briefing from the NUS Provost Prof. Tan Eng Chye on the many initiatives that NUS has developed over the past decades.  The talk was extremely interesting as it highlighted the steady increase of […]

In collaboration with many of my colleagues at Yale-NUS College, and with the patience of Springer, Inc., I happy to report that I have completed my second edition of the Power of Stars book. The new chapters have all been submitted and the publisher is happy to accept these as a new edition to appear some time […]