Singapore University of Social Sciences
SUSS provides an applied education that targets both fresh school leavers and adult learners disciplines that have a strong impact on human and community development. It offers a diverse range of courses with more than 80 undergraduate and graduate programmes across five schools, delivered in flexible and modular pathways:
- S R Nathan School of Human Development
- School of Business
- School of Humanities and Behavioural Sciences
- School of Law
- School of Science and Technology
To date, over 38,000 graduates have experienced our unique brand of education, and each year, over 15,000 students are pursuing their full- or part-time studies with us.
SUSS's e-learning facilities and blended learning approach also enable students to flexibly pursue a university education with other commitments. The curricula and methodologies are developed by experienced academic and industry experts to equip students with knowledge, key competencies and soft skills that serve to better position SUSS graduates for employment.
Technology-enhanced Learning at SUSS
SUSS’s technology-enhanced learning (TEL) approach is to ensure that students’ learning is maximised through leveraging on the power of technology. The strategy to teaching and learning is to employ technology to:
- enable flexibility in learning;
- enable situated and experiential learning;
- support personalised and self-directed learning; and
- foster interaction and collaborative learning.
This is achieved through an ecosystem for digital learning whereby the core mission is to ensure students have choices for how, where, when and what they learn.
Mobile Responsive - SUSS’s Learning Service cluster adopts the core strategies of “Digital and Mobile First” whereby the technologies implemented are always accessible on multiple devices (i.e. desktop, laptop, tablet and smartphone) and across various operating systems (i.e. iOS, Android, Windows and Mac).
Digital Content – SUSS learning content is offered in various digital format with the mobile-ready and interactive StudyGuide (iSG) being a distinctive SUSS offering that comes with every course. It is a personal e-book, which provides students with a convenient single point-of-access to all critical learning resources and contains detailed information on the course structure. Preview some of our award-winning StudyGuides.
Digital Service - SUSS’s Learning Service cluster developed a few mobile apps to ensure students’ TEL is fully supported and seamless. One example is the SUSS Backpack, which is a mobile app that enables students and faculty quick access to their class timetable, iStudyGuides, recorded lectures, narrated presentation materials and past year exam papers. It also comes installed with useful student resources such as academic writing and essential learning skills to help our students enhance their learning experience in SUSS. Another digital service is the SUSS Reader, which is a reader app specially developed to allow SUSS students to read StudyGuides (iSGs) and other ePub eBooks with convenience and ease.
Cloud Infrastructure – To support video-based self-directed learning, SUSS develops the Video Learning Portal, which is both the University’s video-learning resource portal as well as an institution-wide repository for all schools and departments. Students can visit the portal at https://videolearning.suss.edu.sg to view curated videos on the public gallery, or log in with their SUSS account to access personalised content such as their classroom recordings, view featured videos of guest lectures and seminars that aid their learning, as well as watch post-recorded event videos of student orientation, briefings, conferences and workshops.
Professional Development for TEL
The Teaching and Learning Centre (TLC) at SUSS supports the continuous learning of faculty through a number of professional development in teaching and learning (PDTL) workshops and various discussion-based webinars to help faculty and associates share and learn the best teaching practices from each other, including practices of technology-enhanced teaching.
The PDTL model, endorsed by SUSS T&L committee, shows the roadmap to develop and to nurture an active, collaborative and reflective community of practitioners. The aim is to ensure our entire teaching faculty and associates are skilled to teach in the unique SUSS academic landscape through a mandatory Fundamentals in T&L series and to ensure continuous deepening of their knowledge and skills through auxiliary provisions recommended by the PDTL Recommender that assesses their teaching needs. We hope to nurture a team of teaching professionals that will continue to give back to the community by sharing their accumulated expertise and knowledge.
Academic Success for TEL
Besides enhancing faculty’s technology teaching capabilities, SUSS is equally vested in developing students’ learning capabilities. To ensure academic success for students, various units in SUSS uses analytics and work collaboratively to provide timely, targeted and personalised learning support to students.
By harnessing the power of student engagement data with learning systems and resources, insights are drawn to tailor the learning experience of individual students to improve their success and wellbeing. This will be presented as an integrated student learning engagement dashboard that pulls together different data sources (LMS, eTextbook, iStudyGuide, Panopto, Zoom recordings, and so on) to show a comprehensive view of student’s learning behaviour over time. The learning analytics dashboard can also provide timely information to instructors to facilitate personalised coaching to students who needed it most.
Other TEL Initiatives
Hybrid learning
Besides blended learning and online learning, the University is also exploring hybrid learning (to engage online and onsite participants at the same time), including its facilities and pedagogies to enable more flexibility in students’ learning.
Adaptive learning system (AdLeS)
The development of AdLeS is a project under SUSS’s 10-year Strategic Plan. The AdLeS project is intended as an academic bridging tool to support diverse needs of SUSS’s adult learners by recommending personalised learning pathways. The design of AdLeS includes elements of adaptive content, assessment and sequencing, enabled by a machine learning algorithm.
Developing learning analytic tools for enhanced teaching and learning
SUSS continues to use analytics as a leverage to develop and deepen teaching and learning at the University. The University is working on using text mining to develop the intelligence to mine large corpus of text with the aim of developing analytic tools where instructors and students can act on the mined and visualised data for reflection and improvement.