The fifth conference in this series will be held at the National University of Singapore during 3–5 December 2008. The theme for this conference is Frontiers in Higher Education. At this conference, new developments and improvements in various key areas in higher education will be discussed.

The conference will facilitate the exchange of information on new developments and ideas on various tracks (see below) with a view to enhance teaching and learning. Teachers, students, educational administrators, researchers, industries, employers and government are cordially invited to contribute. The conference will consist of keynote addresses, invited lectures, pre-conference workshops, concurrent sessions (paper presentations) and poster sessions. English is the official language of the conference.

Within the general theme, the conference programme focuses on the following tracks:

• Integrative Learning
  
  
  • How do we help learners to integrate diverse bodies of knowledge, making connections between courses within the same subject as well as between subjects?
    
    
  • How do we help learners to integrate the methodologies and modes of justification and critical thinking in diverse fields and knowledge traditions?
    
    
  • How do we help learners to connect knowledge and life experiences, theory and practice, understanding and action, ideas and values?
    
    
• Scholarship of Teaching
  
  
  • How do we distinguish between the scholarship expected of researchers in the Departments/Schools of education, and the “scholarship” of teaching expected of teachers of all subjects?
    
    
  • Granted that self-conscious reflection, experimentation and discussion on educational and pedagogical issues can improve the quality of student learning, how crucial is the next step, that of being up-to-date on research on education and publishing articles on education?
    
    
  • In pushing for scholarship of teaching, are the specialists in education pushing for a self-seeking agenda of increased recognition of what they do as educational researchers?
    
    
• Teaching Methodologies
  
  
  • A practicing teacher is confronted by a wide array of approaches to teaching and learning, some of which are matters of pedagogy while others are matters of expected learning outcomes: active learning, interactive learning, collaborative learning, task-based learning, project-based learning, problem-based learning, constructivist learning, inquiry-based learning and so on. How do we go beyond the “supermarket” approach and integrate these fragments of insights into a coherent theory of education and pedagogy
    
    
• Assessment of Student Learning
  
  
  • New ideas in designing assessment tasks to enhance student learning. New practices in collecting student feedback and other sources of evidence to measure learning outcome.
    
    
• Theories of Learning
  
  
  • Behaviourist theories of learning that didn’t distinguish between mice and men were replaced in the second half of the twentieth century by cognitive theories of learning which were not afraid to recognise the human mind as a legitimate construct in psychology. The reaction to behaviourism also produced what is called constructivism, claiming its ancestry in Dewey, Piaget, and Vygotsky. Given the current advances in our understanding of how the human mind and community construct and validate knowledge, what should teachers learn from learning theories?
    
    
• Educational Management
  
  
  • With changes in the educational structure and reduction in budgets, what should educational administrators do to optimise their resources?
    
    
  • How do we ensure that educational administrators are also intellectual and visionary?
    
    
  • How do educational administrators develop a collective vision of education that helps them take ownership of their community?
    
    
• Technology for Learning
  
  
  • The use of information and communication technology in teaching and learning has been an ongoing issue in education. What are some of the new techniques and IT tools that have emerged in recent years? How effective is the use of these IT tools in the tertiary curriculum? How does this shape the development in higher education worldwide?