CTLE Half-Day Faculty Development Workshop:

Arousing Excitement: Learning Design and Active Learning

Date: 3 Feb 2021 (Wednesday)

Time: 9:15a.m.-12:00p.m.

Venue: E3-1032

In the context of changing teaching and learning needs during a period of uncertainties, active learning has become more challenging than ever. Learning design is a concept which encompasses a range of teaching approaches that set out to make the design of learning more tangible and shareable. In this half-day event, experts and practitioners will share creative, learner-centred approaches to group work, course design and the design of learning activities.

Programme:

**Participation in this workshop will be documented as equivalent of three hours of Professional Development for Teaching and Learning (applicable to UM Academic Staff only).**

Speaker Bio

Dr. Preman Rajalingam (Nanyang Technological University)

Preman originally trained as an engineer but his passion is education, and since 2004 he has been a teacher, faculty developer and scholar in higher education. He received his Ph.D. is in Education Psychology from Monash University, Australia in 2011. Preman joined NTU in 2012 as one of the pioneer staff members at LKCMedicine where he took on various faculty and management positions culminating in the role of Assistant Dean, Educational Development. As Assistant Dean he was responsible for faculty development, digital learning, consulting on curriculum development and scholarship in medical education. Preman was instrumental in setting up and scaling up the use Team-based Learning (TBL) at the medical school. His current role, since 2020, has been the Head of NTUs Teaching Learning and Pedagogy Division. As an expert in the use of active-collaborative learning approaches he regularly conducts local and international workshops and is a sought-after teacher and educator. His current research interests include the science of learning underpinning active-collaborative approaches and the evolving roles of teachers in higher education. In his spare time he reads science fiction and plays board games.

Abstract of keynote

Team-Based Learning in Large Classes:

Lessons Learnt from Scaling, Sustaining and Covid-19

Team-based learning (TBL) is a very structured, active-collaborative approach to learning, usually conducted face-to-face. A significant challenge of implementing such innovations in higher education is the ability to scale these approaches to large numbers of students and prevent the erosion of pedagogical principles with time. A new challenge that TBL practitioners have had to deal with this year is teaching completely online. In this presentation, I will describe our experience of rolling out TBL on a large scale and the pros and cons of transitioning to completely online TBL, at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine in Nanyang Technological University Singapore. I will focus on three critical success factors: (1) “team-centric” learning spaces, to foster active, collaborative learning; (2) an e-learning ecosystem, seamlessly integrated to support all phases of the TBL process and (3) teaching teams in which experts in the pedagogical process co-teach with experts in the subject matter. I will discuss if these factors are still relevant in the post-Covid approach to higher education and share our research on the mechanisms that underpin TBL.