Singapore: Creating the Global Classroom

Dates

December 1999 — November 2000

Principal Investigator

Professor Richard Larson (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering)

Goal

The Singapore project was initiated to identify, test, and evaluate alternative pedagogies and the technologies necessary to support them. The Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA) has provided an initial test bed for this work. We have identified a number of vendors that are bringing technologies to market that will be particularly important in enabling the global classroom. We have established effective two-way relations with such vendors by matching their technologies to our pedagogical needs and at the same time feeding our evolving requirements back into their development process.

Overview

iCampus funding allowed the project to launch a number of initiatives, some of which have already received further funding from other sources. Our major results focus on the design of rich asynchronous content and interaction for distance education courses.

Specific program objectives were:

1. To study the teaching, learning and technology-enabled environments of the Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA) program;
2. To assess the potential needs for alternative pedagogical models;
3. To identify facilitating technologies, both available and envisioned, that are supportive of alternative pedagogical models; and
4. To identify and prioritize promising experiments and pilot tests that we can conduct within the SMA program, supported by iCampus, hopefully leading to improved learning opportunities for our students.

The Singapore project agenda was set by a combination of the functional needs of the SMA Program and opportunities and partnerships that presented themselves over the past year. We have spawned a number of significant follow on projects and made concrete contributions to the methodology of SMA.