Mrs Mildred Tan, Chair, SUSS Board of Trustees
Ms Wee Ai Ning, Member, SUSS Board of Trustees
Professor Tan Tai Yong, President, SUSS
Esteemed award winners, colleagues and guests
Thank you all for joining us for our Faculty Appreciation Event 2024. Always a joyful event, the FAE acknowledges colleagues who have distinguished themselves in teaching over the past year.
2. 6 categories of awards will be presented this year:
- The Outstanding Teaching Award (OTA)
- The Excellence in Teaching Award (ETA)
- The Special Award in Innovative Pedagogy (SAiP) – Individual & Team Awards
- The StudyGuide Excellence Award
- The Lecturer Service Award; and
- The Senior Associate Faculty Appointment
3. The award winners represent about 10 percent of our community of educators – the faculty, associates, curriculum developers, and all others involved in our educational mission. The standards are high and the selection process is rigorous, ensuring that our awardees represent the very best principles and practices of education, and the greatest commitment to our students’ educational experience.
4. Education is central to the SUSS mission, a co-equal plank in our three-fold mission of teaching, research and service. SUSS has always, and will always, insist on the importance of teaching, as we give our adult learners and more typical college students the opportunity to obtain a quality education even as many of them are also coping with work, family and other commitments. To meet our students in their areas of need, we must be on top of our game in terms of our industry-relevant curriculum, andragogical techniques, flexible modalities of teaching, use of educational technology, and above all, the passion and commitment of our teachers for their subject and for their students.
5. While today’s award winners have especially distinguished themselves over the past year, I think it is only fair to say that SUSS has many more committed and talented educators than these award winners. We have been blessed with many good applicants for the positions of faculty and associates, and are increasingly in the position of being able to choose the best. Quality control measures. such as monitoring students’ eCE feedback and having colleagues audit classes, ensure that we can retain and encourage the best teachers, and nurture best practices in our teaching.
6. So I would say in my capacity as Provost that SUSS can justly hold its head high in the important work that we are doing to cater to the educational aspirations of thousands of learners – including the working adults – each year.
7. I want to take this opportunity to thank all colleagues for their help in seeing through the first year of our new curriculum. I think we are over the hump, and while there are still teething issues to be sorted out over the next couple of years, the huge exercise of envisioning, planning and executing such a major curricular revision has been a success. While of course change is always difficult, I believe we did the right thing and put in place an educational experience that was right for our students, and will enhance their long-term employability.
8. So all in all, well done, all of you – I think our work over the past year deserves a round of applause.
9. I am the last person to encourage resting on our laurels, so allow me to point out two areas where I think we need to pay particular attention, or where we can step up our efforts.
10. The first is the advent of Generative AI, which has implications for all disciplines and professions, and all of society – but let me focus on its implications for our educational mission. GenAI hit us like a bolt out of the clear blue sky, around about the end of last year, and since then many educational assumptions and practices have been upended. It is not a difference in degree, but in kind altogether. We should not be thinking about how to use GenAI to complement and improve our existing teaching methods and practices – rather, we should be thinking about how our entire teaching mission and methodology must radically change.
11. We now have to assume that students can access well-written and well-researched essays produced by GenAI that (unlike the heyday of Turnitin) are difficult or impossible to detect for borrowing or derivation. Instead of focussing on knowledge impartation, and/or trying to detect the undeclared role of GenAI, we should turn our attention to teaching our students how to solve problems – particularly applied, real-world problems – with the help of GenAI. Let’s assume a world in which general information-gathering, preliminary drafts, basic data analysis, etc, will eventually all be done by GenAI: the question then becomes, how do we nurture leaders and workers who can add value, and thrive in such an environment?
12. In SUSS we have set up an SUSS GenAI task force, chaired by our VP for Learning Services, Associate Professor Lee Wee Leong (and of which I am a part, ex officio), to help us anticipate some of the tech trends and lead the thinking about our educational practice in the era of GenAI. I encourage faculty and associates who have interests and ideas in this area to contribute to our learning and training in this respect.
13. The second area that we need to think about as educators is industry relevance and resilience for our students. This is increasingly important in the face of rapid change and disruption in many industries, again in significant part due to GenAI. As far as is possible for a university, we need to ensure that our students graduate with preparation in terms of core skills, and enough disciplinary and professional knowledge to give them a good head start. The rest will come with continuing education and reskilling, areas in which SUSS will also have to excel. Here again associate faculty will play a crucial role in bringing the most up-to-date industry practices into the classroom, and in leveraging their networks to give our students guidance and opportunities in terms of internships and attachments.
14. In about 2 years’ time, under the new curriculum, our honours students will do an interdisciplinary capstone, working in teams across the schools, and working on a real-world project co-curated and co-assessed by our external partners. This is an ambitious undertaking, and we will need the commitment and expertise of our faculty and associates to bring this to fruition. We take this very seriously, and have already begun planning – I have asked Assistant Provost Associate Professor Calvin Chan to lead a planning team drawing from the different Schools, and the team’s work is already underway.
15. So there is a lot of work that needs to be done in terms of our educational mission, and to ensure that we maintain our high standards. However, I am convinced that our talented and committed faculty and associates are more than equal to the task.
16. In summary, SUSS continues to do very well and maintain high standards in teaching and pedagogy, and this is thanks to our faculty and associates. I would also like to acknowledge my colleagues in the Teaching and Learning Centre for their tireless efforts to drive our thinking and practice in areas like pedagogy, andragogy, assessment and edtech. Thanks also are due to my colleagues in the Office of Associates Management, who have certainly made a big difference in our engagement with Associates since the Office was established last year. The Associates Management Office has also led the organising committee for today’s event.
17. I hope that today’s winners inspire us to put even more effort into our teaching. Let us continue to spur each other on as educators, so that we can prepare our students to truly “dream, dare, and do” great things for Singapore and the world.
18. Thank you.