Distinguished Guests, Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen,
1. A very good morning to all of you.
2. Thank you to Mildred, Hee Kiat, Tai Yong, Robbie and the team in SUSS for their efforts on two counts. First, I would like to affirm SUSS for organising this seminar; it important for us to come together to take a hard look at our own practices, our own professions, and at how we teach and learn. Congratulations to Rebekah and team for organising this inaugural Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Symposium.
3. Secondly, I would like to commend SUSS for your efforts in reviewing your curriculum, and underscore why it's so important for SUSS to keep trying new approaches and ideas.
4. Today, my goal here is simple — I am not here to give all the answers because there are many esteemed colleagues here who are very knowledgeable on the subject of teaching and learning. Instead, I would like to lay out the challenges that we have to overcome as a community and as a fraternity, as well as some of the opportunities that we must seize in this new world.
5. For the rest of the day, you will be talking about changes or potential changes to curriculum, be it the content or the channels and ways in which we're going to change teaching and learning. On this note, I would like to start with a question: what do you think is the most important change that we need to make? Is it the content? The curriculum? Or the channels that we use to transmit knowledge?
6. I would like us to pause and think about this: What is the most important mindset change that we must have when we talk about teaching and learning? I will posit this -- the greatest mindset change is for us not to define the success of our teaching and education system through the first 15 years of our students' lives, but through the next 50 years of their lives.
7. Our benchmark of success should not be based on how well our students do in their exams whilst trying to surpass their peers in the first 15 years their lives. It should instead be based on how our students continue to learn to try to surpass themselves for the next 50 years of their lives.
8. And I am very interested to hear more about the 60-year curriculum, because 15 plus 50 is 65, and this is a happy coincidence. So, if I miss the lecture later, I'll be certain to get a copy of the speech from our keynote speaker because I think that is the correct mindset that we must set -- lifelong learning is not a 15-year sprint, but a 15 plus 50 years marathon that we need to pace ourselves for.
9. Before I go into what else must change, I have four propositions which I think you should keep in mind when we are doing all this for our students and learners.
10. First, teaching is no longer just the transmission of knowledge. Today, the role of the teacher is not just to pass down what is known to the students. In fact, today, knowledge is commoditised. This is also my second proposition -- that knowledge is commoditised. And because knowledge is commoditised, the more important role of teachers and trainers is to facilitate learning and discovery.
11. Today, our students are never short of information. The challenge for students is how to discern the avalanche of information that is available. And my third proposition is that learning is no longer about the passive reception of knowledge.
12. Instead, learning is, more importantly, about picking up the skills to learn, learn fast, unlearn, and relearn. And if that is the most important skill set for us to equip our learners for life, then we must move beyond the emphasis on subject matter content into the real skills of learning and of learning independently by themselves when possible.
13. Finally, my fourth proposition is this: given that knowledge is commoditised, our job in facilitating the education and training systems is not to help our students only to understand yesterday's solutions for yesterday's problems. This is because yesterday's solutions for yesterday's problems have already been commoditised. Our more urgent and more important task is to help our learners find the solutions of tomorrow and frame the challenges of tomorrow ahead of time. This is the backdrop of what we are doing. Which means that the way we design our programmes for our institutions, and for our learners must change.
14. Let me start with the individual. The foundational modules are still important, and we must not neglect that. But over and beyond the foundational modules I believe that we need to equip our people for life with four sets of competencies.
15. First, I had mentioned to the importance of discovering, distilling, and discerning information. Our first key task is thus to help our students sense-make and that must start from young and continue throughout their entire adult lives.
16. Second, instead of focusing on the individual learners, we need to help the individual to collaborate, connect and create. Because in today's world, and especially for Singapore, our competitiveness is not defined by any one individual's capability. We compete on the basis of Team Singapore. We compete on the basis Team Singapore connected to the rest of the world as our hinterland and market, leveraging the best ideas across the world.
17. We must value-add by producing new products and services. The days of being an intermediary are over. Our competitive advantage comes not from being an intermediary. In fact, in many jobs, vocations and businesses, the intermediary will be obsolete quite soon. Our real value-add is to be able to create new products and services at scale and at speed to meet tomorrow's challenges rather than answer yesterday's problems.
18. Third, in today's world, we will find that many of these new products and services that I talked about will come from the intersection of conventional disciplines. And we will need to help our students to operate in this more interdisciplinary environment. But having said that, we must be careful. Not everyone can or should try to be interdisciplinary in all things. Afterall, it is said that most people are good at some things, but only some people are good at most things. Our approach should not be to make everyone an interdisciplinary expert. Instead, we should allow people from different disciplines and backgrounds to come together and work in an interdisciplinary manner for us to solve problems and create new and exciting solutions at the intersection of conventional disciplines.
19. Last but not least, our new 'product design', if I may, is how we can help our learners learn, unlearn, and relearn at speed. Learning in the foundational years is but the foundation. While this is necessary, it is certainly not sufficient. As the world changes evolve at speed, our people and industries must also evolve at speed.
20. I would like to elaborate on the specifications for our institutions, because our institutions are important partners in our learners' journeys.
21. The first thing that Hee Kiat has mentioned is how we need to upskill and reskill our teachers from teaching to facilitating, especially facilitating our adult learners' discovery of new knowledge on their own when possible. And as Hee Kiat also mentioned, we need to think deeply about how we are going to leverage technology to achieve this at scale and at speed. We need to use technology to share and transmit the best practices across the entire ecosystem. Instead of relying on a few star lecturers or teachers, we need to see how we can collate these best practices, teaching methods, and facilitation approaches at scale and speed and proliferate them across the entire ecosystem.
22. We need our teachers to also know how to work with industry so that we can bring frontier knowledge into the learning cycle. How do we shorten the cycle between academia and frontier industry practices? When these two are combined and shortened, then we will be able to compete by the speed of evolution rather than by the scale of our resources.
23. The second thing is: how do we allow anyone to learn anytime, anywhere, and in almost any subject. This can never be achieved through the conventional classroom methods as this will neither draw in the adult learners nor allow us to do this at scale and speed. But today, with platform technologies, our aim should be for anyone to be able to learn anytime, anywhere and almost for any subject. This is not unattainable, and this indeed will be the new way of learning for our adult learners.
24. And the third thing is: how do we ensure the currency and relevance of our faculty? There must not be a divide between academia and applied practices in business and industry. We must break down this divide. This will require us to organise ourselves differently, in how we allow academia to stay in touch with frontier practices, how we allow industries to participate, and perhaps how we can co-create the curriculum for the next generation of learners at speed.
25. We need to heighten the nexus between academia and industry to better organise ourselves to maintain the currency of our faculty and produce a new generation of learners at speed.
26. Which comes to my last point -- that the traditional models of classroom teaching, while still necessary for collaboration, will not be adequate. We must have a plethora of teaching methods and learning experiences in order to meet the needs of our diverse learners. We must start to explore ways to customise the learning experience en masse for our learners. If you look at the history of education systems, many centuries ago, education was limited to only a few and specialised. Then we were able to scale up for some specialised trades. It was only in more recent decades that we have been able to have mass education with a general broad curriculum.
27. In the next stage of education and training, we will need to break new ground by asking ourselves how we can provide education for the masses that is also customised for the individual. And today, technology with some of the best practices allow us to better mass customise according to individual needs to bring out the best from everyone.
28. This will require us to train our learners to do self-paced learning, adaptive learning and embark on modular upgrading programmes in a very targeted way, just like the Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT), which launched a programme yesterday based on competencies and not general degrees and diplomas. Mass customization will allow us to do this in a very targeted way.
29. Let me conclude. The world is changing and there are many challenges, but there are just as many opportunities for us. For us to remain true to our mission to bring out the best in our learners, we have to challenge ourselves to come up with new ways to teach and learn, and all this starts from the basic premise that this journey will not be a 15-year sprint, but a 60 or 65 years marathon. We have to pace ourselves, build the foundations, and continue re-learning at the individual level. At the institution level, we have to keep trying new ideas to enable our people to do this.
30. This is why I want to congratulate SUSS. I applaud SUSS for having the courage to challenge themselves to come up with new pedagogies, and new ways of organising themselves in order to meet evolving needs. And my encouragement to SUSS will be this: go forth and try. If it doesn't work perfectly right at the start then tweak it, adjust it, make constant improvements and it will keep improving because there will never be a perfect system that will never be better with change.
31. As I was taught from a young age, a plan is a basis for change. Most people don't plan to fail, but sometimes we fail to plan. However, with a good, sound plan like what we are launching today, I am confident that we have what it takes to keep improving. Most importantly, it's not the plan, but also the spirit behind the plan. The ability and the courage to constantly try new things, explore new frontiers. Because if we want to tell our young and adult learners that they must keep learning new things and exploring new things, then there's absolutely no reason why as an institution, we wouldn't do the same. We will lead by example, to discover, distil and discern. Congratulations once again to SUSS.
Thank you very much.