Singapore has done well through the years by adopting foreign technology and providing political stability and a sound economy within which investors can operate successfully. Our focus on quality education has produced a workforce which is able to learn and apply foreign expertise quickly and effectively. This formula for success, however, will not be sufficient in the next phase of growth.

In less than four years' time, Singapore will enter the 21st Century as a developed economy and will compete with other larger developed economies in the first league. Moreover, it has been widely recognised that economic competition fuelled by technological innovations will be much more intense in the 21st Century. We will thus need to ensure that we have world-class capabilities and quality human resources to survive and advance as a developed economy. Singapore's competitiveness will depend more and more on its ability to innovate (i.e., to develop higher value-added processes, better quality products and services) continuously, in order to keep ahead of strong competitors.

What are the major implications of the above changes in the 21st Century for postsecondary education in Singapore? This is a topic of great interest today as you are working upstream of the whole education process. You will naturally want to know the possible future scenarios so that you can examine the necessary changes in schools in order to better prepare the students for their next stage of education.

I shall focus on the implications for university education but these should have general applicability. After a quick survey of the changes in skills and competencies that graduates should have in the 21st Century, I shall discuss what corresponding changes should be made to the teaching and assessment methods at the university in order to ensure that the requisite learning objectives are achieved. This will include the appropriate and innovative use of information technology to enhance learning. Next, I shall discuss the often neglected but essential role of the non-academic aspects of university education, in particular their contribution to developing the students' emotional intelligence. I shall end by stating my view on the need for formal training of all academic staff and briefly relating what I have discussed to the development of entrepreneurial qualities.

I. Changing Skills and Competencies

When knowledge and technology can be easily imported, the primary concerns of the workforce are rapid implementation and adaptation. Reduction to practice, technology transfer and problem-solving involve know-what and know-how skills which for the most part use logical reasoning and analytical thinking.

Creative problem solving. There is little need for originality,creativity or innovative thinking except for a small number of senior managers and leaders who are in charge of overall policy, planning and strategy selection. This scenario will change rapidly. To prosper in the 21st Century as a small country and compete with the top tier of developed countries, Singapore needs to have exceptional performance.

As reminded recently by our Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (when he gave the opening speech on 28 May '96 to launch the NUS's Annual Literacy Encounter Programme), creativity can no longer be confined to a small elite group of Singaporeans. The whole workforce needs creative problem-solving skills and they cannot just follow their leaders without thinking and understanding. He stressed that we need a sound educational system which stretches our students' creative potential. For university students, it is therefore essential that they be equipped with higher-order thinking abilities, which include analytical, creative and systems thinking, in order to function more effectively in the workplace of the 21st Century.

Teamworking and networking. To achieve exceptional performance, Singapore also needs to mobilise and harness the strength of teamwork and network. Individuals must be equipped with interpersonal and teamworking skills. Teamworking is especially important for high-tech economic competition as success there requires specialists from the different disciplines of science, engineering, marketing, sales, finance and others to work as a cohesive team. A modern concurrent engineering approach to reduce time-to-market and thus gain competitive advantage requires even more intimate working relationships and trust among many people.

Even in non-high-tech organisations of the future, the use of information technology will be so pervasive that organi-sational structure will be flattened and workers will be empowered to form ad hoc teams to solve problems with little supervision. Networking provides extra resources for mutual collaboration within the organisation and the global village. If Singapore can truly take advantage of global resources capital, materials and knowledge the natural limitations of a small nation can be minimised.

Finally, team and network effectiveness would be enhanced if the members possess shared values and a strong sense of social responsibility in addition to social skills. University education should continue to build on the foundation which has been laid by schools and contribute towards all these aspects of non-academic development.

Information technology and lifelong learning. The advances in information technology (IT) have accelerated the arrival of the information age in which the rate of knowledge generation is exponential and the life cycle of information will continually shrink. With easy access to abundant information, a proactive mindset and competencies to seek, process and apply relevant information will take precedence over the actual knowledge content.

Knowledge workers (especially scientists and engineers)of the 21st Century are also expected to retool themselves every three to five years. It is thus essential that they receive an education which provides a broad, multidisciplinary foundation for lifelong learning. At the extreme, knowledge workers will be using IT tools to acquire just-in-time specific knowledge, and they will need to acquire the discipline to set aside time for learning every day.

II. Implications for Teaching and Assessment

While changes in the 21st Century will be rapid and drastic, the time taken to equip our graduates with the desired skills and competencies cannot be shortened significantly. It therefore behoves educators to anticipate these changes as early as possible and proactively change the present methods of university teaching and assessment to ensure that the requisite learning objectives are achieved.

Teaching learning skills. The acquisition of knowledge is no longer the most important objective of university education. The acquisition of process skills, i.e. learning how to learn, is equally important, if not more important, than the acquisition of knowledge itself. Process skills refer to the abilities to source, analyse, screen, prioritize and apply a mass of information to solve the problem at hand. Such skills are especially important in the new era where the growth of knowledge is explosive and lifelong independent learning is essential. The academic staff should realise that the learning of process skills is more time-consuming, and hence they need to make suitable adjustments to the subject syllabus in order that the students are not overloaded.

Another more important consequence is that the teaching method should shift in emphasis from passive lecturing to mentoring and small group tutorials. Academic staff mentors who are active researchers would be ideal persons to inspire the students to develop strong interests in learning and guide them in exploring alternative ways of approaching a new topic or resolving an open-ended problem. Small group tutorials would also enable students to participate more actively in group discussions and further develop their listening and speaking skills.

With the help of multimedia and advanced communication technology, it may also be feasible to supplement face-to-face tutorials with interactive tutorials in cyberspace,Consultation with academic staff virtually any time and anywhere, and cooperative learning among students, may be facilitated thanks to the advances in IT tools. Academic staff can decide on the appropriate balance between more costly face-to-face sessions and less personal IT tools depending on the specific overall learning experience of the individual student and whether the subject is a core requirement or an option. (Note that I have used the term "academic staff" instead of "lecturers" as the latter may become a misleading term in the 21st Century!)

Teaching creative thinking. Our educators need to take up the challenge of developing the creative thinking abilities of students. The present method of teaching focuses on developing the analytical thinking abilities. Students are educated to think in a convergent manner and to arrive at unique answers to closed-ended simplified problems, particularly in the science and engineering disciplines. Real-world problems that need creative thinking are usually complex, not well understood, and tend to have more than one appropriate answer.

Creative thinking skills can be developed by exposing students to the process of creative thinking by conducting workshops designed for them to practise idea generation, synthetic though and other forms of creative thinking and by integrating the teaching of creative thinking skills into the subject areas. It is, however, important to realise that the higher order thinking skills to be further developed in university education include both analytical and creative thinking skills and the latter does not displace/replace the former. Indeed, as Dr. Edward De Bono, a world renowned authority on the subject of creativity has estimated, creative thinking may be used only five percent of the time in practice. Creative thinking is especially important in formulating problems and exploring alternative methods. Final decision-making, based on the evaluation of alternatives and the detailing of action plans for implementation, will require analytical thinking, and this will occupy the other 95% of the time.

Incorporation of creative elements in course contents requires academic staff to reformulate the problems so as to give students an opportunity to exercise their creative thinking skills and to encourage the adoption of an "open mind" attitude during the process of learning the knowledge contents. Exercises in problem formulation and visualisation, as well as learning through discovery, are additional methods the academic staff can explore. Fortunately, advances in artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology have also given us many creativity tools which may be used to facilitate and enhance learning.

Alternative assessment methods. Assessment methods will also need to be reviewed with the shift in teaching emphasis and in the incorporation of creativity in education. One major obstacle to the acquisition of process skills is the habit of rote learning which does not promote engagement with and real mastering of what is being learnt. As a result the students tend to lose interest early.

To move students away from rote learning, the use of alternative assessment methods, such as the open-book examination which lends itself to testing the students' process skills in problem-solving, should be increased. Examination questions should also be less predictable to discourage reliance on practising past-years' papers and on recall capabilities. Open-ended problems along with open-book examinations are better suited to assess the students' creative thinking abilities to solve non-structured and non-routine problems. These will supplement conventional methods for testing a stu-dent's ability in analysing and solving structured problems. Individual oral presentations and participation in tutorial discussions should be graded and given sufficient weightage to encourage the development of good communication skills. To encourage the development of teamworking skills, bonus marks may be awarded for good teamwork or outstanding team performance.

The increasing use of IT tools for interactive tutorials and independent project work provides another means of assessing students' progress and achievement. In a brainstorming exercise, for instance, the creative thinking skills of a student can be assessed by the number and quality of the alternative ideas proposed. These can be easily tracked using computer software.

Broad-based knowledge. I would like to mention two other important considerations. Owing to the time constraint, I shall be brief. One is the need to emphasise a broad-based multidisciplinary knowledge foundation for the 21st Century, even at the expense of some specialised knowledge. I shall just quote one example for your reflection. I have learnt that M.I.T. has recently required all first-year students (science, engineering, social science, etc.) to take a course on biology. Contrast this with the local situation where "A" level students other than those in the medical stream do not study biology, and even some "0" level students are allowed to drop biology! Such an early specialisation will constrain unduly the development of a flexible and adaptive workforce when the economic environment and opportunities undergo major changes.

Systems thinking. The other important consideration is the need to teach "systems thinking" as an important component of higher order thinking skills to deal with complex real-life problems. A relevant and familiar example is the following. All teachers want to do their job well and give a great deal of homework to the students. The teachers may be satisfied when the students return good grades. At the systems level, however, we may find that this is poor education if the students, being over-pressured, cannot find time to develop social and other necessary nonacademic skills. A worse consequence may be that the students' interests in learning are "killed" in the process! Teachers who are familiar with systems thinking should be able to identify these possible pitfalls and thus plan accordingly. Experts now believe that the elements of systems thinking should be taught even in primary schools!

III. Implications for Non-Academic Developments

Emotional intelligence. While innovations in teaching and assessment methods will improve the students' intellectual and technical capabilities, a sustainable outstanding performance in the workplace of the 21st Century will require that individual team members possess what the experts call "emotional intelligence" (measured by emotional intelligence quotient, or E.Q. in short). Emotional intelligence includes self-awareness and impulse control, persistence, zeal and self-motivation, empathy, and social deftness. It determines how effectively individuals perform in groups and complements traditional roles of rationa] intelligence (measured by intelligence quotient, or I.Q. in short). Outstanding organisations of the 21st Century need "star" performers who possess both high I.Q. and E.Q., in addition to strong teams of knowledge workers.

Let me elaborate on the quality of "star" performers. The world renowned Bell Laboratories in the USA attracts scientists and engineers who are all at the top on academic I.Q. tests. But within this pool of talent, some emerge as stars, while others remain average in their output. What makes the difference between stars and others is not their I.Q.s, but their E.Q.s. Star performer are better able to motivate themselves and work their informal networks into ad hoc but winning teams. The "stars" were studied in one division of the Labs, whose sophisticated work required teams ranging from 5 to 150 scientists and engineers. No single person knew enough to do the job alone; getting things done demanded tapping other people's expertise. The study report, published in Harvard Business Review, clearly indicated that a middle performer often had difficulty getting the ad hoc team to solve an unanticipated problem; he painstakingly called various technical gurus and then waited, wasting valuable time while calls went unreturned and email messages unanswered. Star performers, on the other hand, rarely faced such situations because they did the work of building reliable networks long before they actually need them. When they called someone for advice, stars almost always got a faster answer.

Besides networking, star performers also excel in other aspects of emotional intelligence. These include effective coordination, expertise in building consensus, ability to see things from the perspectives of others, persuasiveness, ability to promote cooperation, and a high level of initiative. Incidentally, I believe that the presence of such star performers can help us solve one important problem in Singapore that of job hopping. If we have star performers leading and building strong teams of knowledge workers of the future, the team members will find it more difficult emotionally to job hop for small gains elsewhere!

The challenge. In view of the importance of emotional intelligence in enabling effective teamwork and creating star performers in organisations of the future, the development of the basic skills of emotional intelligence should become an essential and explicit goal of university education, and academic staff must take up this challenge. The basics of emotional intelligence can be taught both in schools and in universities. Awareness and skills can be improved through special workshops conducted by experts.

However, we should realise that emotional intelligence cannot be fully developed and improved in the classroom alone. As in primary and secondary schools, non-academic aspects of university education provide better and more varied opportunities for personal growth,reinforcing societal values and responsibilities. Networking and teamworking are other components of emotional intelligence which can be more effectively enhanced through team sports, clubs, committee assignments and other extracurricular activities. I would venture to add that certain qualities such as determination, enthusiasm and passion which are strengthened in non-academic pursuits are also important in academic performance especially in research and scholarship.

Our academic staff should be urged to apply systems thinking themselves to fully understand that educational objectives incorporate both academic and non-academic aspects. As nonacademic performance is difficult to assess and hence not graded, students have the tendency to focus their attention only on the academic aspects in order to score good grades. To optimise the entire educational experience, academic staff therefore need to play a critical role in guiding the students to pursue a more balanced educational experience for long-term benefits. I would like to further suggest that our academic staff apply the principle of concurrent engineering to the educational process/products this will convince them to move upstream to work in partnership with schools to achieve synergy.

Finally, staff should have the shared vision to build a campus culture that makes the university a caring community, a place where students feel respected and cared about, and experience bonding with classmates, academic staff and the university itself. Academic staff need to be role models and extend their care to and influence over the students. The university will then be well regarded as an outstanding national resource to serve the function of nurturing and strengthening both the academic and emotional intelligence of our students.

IV. Concluding Remarks

Formal staff training. All the necessary changes discussed above cannot be carried out effectively if academic staff are not well prepared to face the new challenges. To overcome resistance and instil enthusiasm, formal staff training in the fresh approaches to teaching, assessment and learning will be essential. The skills and attitude of staff in contributing to the non-academic aspects of education need special attention as staff performance in this area is hardest to track. University management will need to review the staff appraisal system to ensure that it rewards academic staff who have successfully negotiated the paradigm shift.

University staff will be encouraged to share their experience with our school-teachers, alert them of future changes, and provide feedback to help schools be more effective. I hope my presentation today also communicates the message that the University appreciates the critical role played by schools and the cooperation should be further strengthened by more regular dialogue sessions.

Cultivating entrepreneurship. I have not touched directly on the interesting and important question of how we could nurture entrepreneurship. More of our graduates will become entrepreneurs as opportunities for new business ventures are created by the rapid technological revolution and the economic development in other parts of Asia. It is also recognised that the competitive advantage of a nation is significantly enhanced if the workforce and the leaders have entrepreneurial spirit and qualities.

It suffices to mention here that the nurturing of higher order thinking skills and the development of emotional intelligence all help potential entrepreneurs who will need these competencies to create new ventures and persevere in the face of ever-increasing competition. A person strong in emotional intelligence is unlikely to develop the "risk-averse (or kiasu)" attitude which would lead to negative consequences such as "unwilling[ness] to make a decision" or "not giving the new method a chance to be tried out".

It is also well-known that entrepreneurs are experts in networking. In this respect, the university will have another good reason to significantly increase the number of foreign students or provide more opportunities for local students to study abroad through exchange programmes. The friendship and the global networks thus developed will be very helpful to future generations of university graduates who subsequently become entrepreneurs and leaders.

I have focused on university education in my presentation. I believe, however, that much of what I have said is equally important to other post-secondary educational institutions which aspire to be learning organisations of the future. Let us all work towards producing learning environments which are exciting and creative for our students, equipping them to face the challenges of the 21st Century.