How are Universities are coping with the New Normal during and after the Pandemic: Sharing of Practices, Research and Reflections from Singapore and Asia
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought about challenges for universities to continue the education they are providing even as students have to stay out of campus for most of the lessons. The lockdowns in schools and universities have necessitated emergency responses in the quick adoption of online and blended learning. Practices have quickly emerged such as the movement of examinations and yearly admission exercises to online, and live hybrid learning in which instructors become TV show hosts, teaching students in-person in the classroom as well as students watching the lecture live online. Indeed, more opportunities arise to bring about educational change or paradigm shifts that were once out of reach. Some universities have used the pandemic as an opportunity to re-define the intent and curricula of their undergraduate education.
In this talk, I will discuss some of the policies and strategies that universities have adopted to continue undisrupted learning, speaking from a Singapore perspective and also sharing examples from elsewhere in Asia. From these varied practices and supplemented by reported research studies, we will tease out new salient understandings from a learning sciences perspective.
Chee-Kit Looi is Professor of Education at the National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He was the founding Head of the Learning Sciences Lab, the first research centre devoted to the study of the sciences of learning in the Asia-Pacific region. He is currently the Co-Director of the Centre for Research and Development in Learning at NTU.
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About the speaker:
Chee-Kit LOOI is Professor of Education at the National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He was the founding Head of the Learning Sciences Lab, the first research centre devoted to the study of the sciences of learning in the Asia-Pacific region. He is currently the Co-Director of the Centre for Research and Development in Learning at NTU.
His research interests are in the areas of seamless learning, computer-supported collaborative learning, computational thinking, and sustainability and scaling of educational innovations.
He is the PI or co-PI of several research projects funded by the National Research Foundation, Singapore. His research has created significant inroads into transforming school practices: his work on rapid collaborative learning has created routine practices of collaborative work in ten primary and secondary schools. His research on seamless and mobile learning has made good progress toward creating a model of 1:1 computing in schools in Singapore so that they can harness the affordances of mobile devices for inquiry learning. This research is remarkable in terms of reaching some sustainability and scalability.
Chee-Kit is a member of the Core Expert Group who worked on developing the framework for assessing Collaborative Problem Solving in OECD PISA 2015. He is special consultant to the Smart Learning Institute of Beijing Normal University. Chee Kit is a Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Society on Computers in Education, and served as the President of the Global Chinese Society of Computers in Education from 2017 to 2019.