Nanyang Technological University
A research-intensive public university, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has 33,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students in the Engineering, Business, Science, Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences, and Graduate colleges. It also has a medical school, the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, set up jointly with Imperial College London.
NTU is also home to world-class autonomous institutes – the National Institute of Education, S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Earth Observatory of Singapore, and Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering – and various leading research centres such as the Nanyang Environment & Water Research Institute (NEWRI) and Energy Research Institute @ NTU (ERI@N).
Under the NTU Smart Campus vision, the University harnesses the power of digital technology and tech-enabled solutions to support better learning and living experiences, the discovery of new knowledge, and the sustainability of resources.
NTU's TEL Framework
Next-gen Learning Experience with NTULearn Ecosystem
The NTULearn ecosystem has helmed the forefront of the University’s progress in education technology by providing a dynamic digital learning environment for over 10 years. In the past 2 years, an accelerated trajectory in digital transformation was achieved to adapt to the ever-changing education landscape. A strong infrastructure enabled swift adaptability to COVID-19 pandemic requirements with an academic continuity that leaves no student behind. At the heart of this digital transformation strategy is the purposeful blend of digital learning innovations to enhance the lesson delivery, e-Assessments and T&L learning experiences, powered by the framework, Virtual Adaptiveness for Distributed Learning (VADL) model.
VADL Model is a framework to guide our new frontier of learning tech services for NTU. It was evolved from the TEL project, since 2015, and refined to serve the requirements of strategic goals for NTU Education 2025. There are 2 key elements in the framework, where both are equally important and complementary – adaptiveness for the virtual environment to serve the various types of lesson and assessment capabilities, and the distribution of teachers/learners experiencing the lessons from non-centralised locations independent of time and place.
NTU's TEL (Technology-enhanced Learning) Initiative
Since the inception of TEL, NTU had deployed a large catalogue of undergraduate courses through the NTULearn ecosystem and made the shift of all classes to the virtual environment within one week from the start of the Circuit Breaker lockdown. This was powered by a new scalable cloud-based Learning Management System that had accommodated an increase of cloud storage by 400% for digital learning content.
To ensure that all students complete their final examinations, NTULearn made this possible by introducing an AI-based proctoring tool for e-assessments.
A strategic partnership with Coursera was also established and integrated as part of NTULearn to allow undergraduate students to obtain transfer credits upon completion of MOOC courses at no cost, with savings amounting to over $2m and shaping new behaviours for Lifelong Learning.
A new cloud-based Student Response System was implemented for distributed lessons that allowed lecturers and students to synchronously interact and access multimedia content and platforms from different locations.
The NTULearnVideo tool was also introduced in January 2021, bringing forth the latest innovation, the effective capability to further enhance the online learning experience through its catalogue of over 250,000 videos produced in NTU.
