Faculty of Medicine
Clinical Teaching Videos for Medical Students

With the help of the Centre for Instructional Technology (CIT), CITA-Medicine has produced two clinical teaching videos on cardiology examination and clinical presentation skills for the medical curriculum. Scriptwriters, producers, directors, and cast included Professor Chia Boon Lock, Associate Professor Kuldip Singh, Dr Ivor Lim, and Dr Fong Yoke Fai, with excellent technical supervision by Mr Manuel Gamboa from CIT. The shooting was carried out on location at the National University Hospital and the footage was edited by CIT. The videos are aimed at the Clinical Skills Foundation Course for this year’s M2 students and are presented online in MEDNet, the medical curriculum intranet (http://www.mednet.nus.edu.sg/resources/resources.htm).

Faculty of Engineering
The Application of IT in Teaching, Tutoring & Assessment

To enhance the teaching and learning experience for students and educators, the Engineering Faculty has sought to apply IT in teaching, tutoring, and assessment since 1997, such as providing shells for developing course notes on the World Wide Web, creating JAVA or other forms of web-based interactive programmes, and generating JAVA problems for use with a monitoring system. Presently, 8 different courseware have been developed and are online, covering modules such as Dynamics, Vibrations, Computer Aided Manufacturing, Thermodynamics, Calculus, Statistics, Algebra, Digital Systems, and two virtual experiments (Simple Beam and Angular Momentum). A key element in each courseware is the integration of different internet technologies to provide a comprehensive approach to teaching using the WWW.

For instance, the Thermodynamics and Heat Transfer Portal for the EG1105 module provides students with a one-stop place for getting information. The portal has five sections: Main, Multimedia, Courseware, Contact and Search. The Main Section allows any course-related announcements to be easily disseminated and highlights any new updates to the site. Under Multimedia, streaming videos, animations, and online lectures in PDF or PowerPoint Broadcast are available for viewing to reinforce and aid in understanding. In the Courseware Section, students can do tutorial problems that can be diagnosed online through the Flying Fish v1.39 monitoring software; this section also features other useful courseware links on the WWW. The Contact function enables students to give feedback and ask questions about the course through email or discussion forum. The Search page facilitates students in their own research.

Faculty of Science
A Vista to the Mathematical Landscape

Have you ever felt baffled by pages of mathematical symbols that purportedly describe how planes, lines and points are arranged in three-dimensional spaces or how the rate of expansion of a soap bubble is dependent on its current surface area? This feeling of helplessness used to be shared by many students learning Calculus and Linear Algebra. But not any more. In 1998, two teams from the staff of the Department of Mathematics revised the teaching of the two basic courses of Calculus and Linear Algebra by incorporating computer graphics and animation using the Derive and MATLAB software respectively. The computer animations help students visualise physical realisations of abstract mathematical results. Besides being treated to panoramic views of intersecting planes, roller coasters and other mathematical structures, students are also expected to explore the subject using the courseware developed for the course. The feedback from students reveals that this confluence of visualisation and experimentation in examining difficult concepts has helped them acquire deeper understanding in, and greater enthusiasm for, the subject. Further refinements to the courses of Calculus and Linear Algebra as well as extending the use of computer technology to other mathematics courses are envisaged.

Faculty of Business Administration
Experiential Learning in the Faculty of Business Administration

Two groups of BBA undergraduates (61 students) attended a first-ever 2-day residential workshop in Pulau Ubin as part of a third-year module on Managerial Skills: Theory and Practice in January this year. This course requires students to reflect deeply about how their attitudes, behaviours, and skills affect work performance. A classroom setting cannot achieve this. However, experiential exercises in an outdoor setting provide students with the opportunity to examine their own strengths and the depth of their interaction with others. Debriefing these activities promotes self-awareness for long-term learning. As part of their course assessment, students must ponder over their experience and highlight some areas for personal improvements in their individual reports.

Says Noor Hanna bte Md Esa, a participant: “My coursemates and I recognised and were made aware of our strengths and weaknesses in participating in activities that test our understanding of skills in communicating, listening, and working in teams, amongst others. These skills, my coursemates and I agreed unanimously, cannot be grasped if learnt theoretically, by passive listening in class. Apart from the learning, we also had the opportunity to get to know one another better, and realised that this helps to facilitate our class discussions in lessons that followed after the camp.”

Faculty of Dentistry
Virtual Realty Simulation System for Pre-clinical Teaching in Dentistry

For the past year, pre-clinical students at the Faculty of Dentistry have been honing their operative (tooth cavity preparation) skills on the DentSim® system, the world’s first dental virtual reality simulation training system. Our dental school is one of the first worldwide to adopt this cutting-edge technology in pre-clinical teaching of operative skills. In DentSim®, the student performs cavity preparations on plastic teeth in a traditional phantom head simulator that is also modelled in a ‘virtual world’ in a PC workstation. Optic motion sensors track the static position of the head and teeth as well as the dynamic movement of the dental drill tip in real time. Thus as the plastic tooth is drilled, the virtual tooth undergoes the same process. To make the simulation more realistic, the presence and location of decay is also modelled in the virtual tooth.

In the traditional method of instruction, the student would perform the procedure to the limit of his self-assessment capabilities and knowledge base and then consult the human instructor for guidance or grading. By providing real time feedback to the student, DentSim® instead provides an immediate, interactive training loop of instruction, guidance, correction, and evaluation of psycho-motor skills through the personal computer. Automatically stored in the system as a three-dimensional ‘movie’, the entire procedure can be replayed and reviewed by the human instructor to highlight procedural errors to the student at any time. The student can also practise his/her skills independently, outside of traditional laboratory hours, thus escaping the traditional constraints of time and space. Storage of practice and test sessions allows full error tracking and a ‘training history’ of each student. Students have likened the system to a computer arcade game in which they are challenged to beat the machine and achieve higher scores in the quest for the perfect cavity preparation.

School of Design & Environment
Houses for Poets

The final project for Level 1 students at the Department of Architecture, entitled P4: Habitat, was an important design exercise that challenges students to express their conceptual, interpretive and architectural skills learnt in two semesters. A group of 17 students interpreted the works of 17 local poets and then designed dwellings for the selected poets. The project lasted five weeks and some time prior to the exercise was spent measuring and understanding a suitable site in Penang that could possibly be used to construct these dwellings. The anthologies were a means for students to learn and understand the historical, geographical, social and cultural contexts that shaped Singapore and the poetry, yet allowed design interpretation and architectural exploration as well as development for each scheme. As the project crossed over into the literary discipline, some students were able to communicate with poets face-to-face or by email while developing their schemes. Many poets who subsequently visited the design studio and examined these houses were impressed with the final design interpretations and realisations.

School of Computingt
Integrating the Use of Discussion Forums with Project Work

In the course Human-Computer Interaction conducted in Semester 2, 1999/2000, we deployed a discussion forum that allowed us to tightly integrate its use with students’ work on the course project. Students first had to view the multimedia projects created by their peers via a specially constructed web link in the forum. They were then required to critique the quality of the projects they reviewed within the discussion forum. In this way, these critiques served as formative evaluations for the students whose projects were being reviewed, and a discussion was fostered by the interchange of ideas among students for improving the quality of the work. Owing to this special learning design, the content in the discussion forum proved meaningful and useful to the students, and thus was valued. This electronic forum, called HYPERForum, was developed by an Honours student. Among its unique features are the incorporation of support for peer rating of projects and message quality, use of color coding for representing message context as well as incorporation of student photos to encourage individual responsibility for content posted and to build up a sense of a learning community.