Dear colleagues,

Greetings for 2009! I hope the December break has been a restful one for you, and that you are now ready for a brand new year. As we embark on the start of this new year, I thought I should get in touch with fellow colleagues and share some thoughts with you.

As many of you are aware, CDTL has established many programmes under the leadership of our colleague, Associate Professor Daphne Pan. During Daphne’s tenure as Director of CDTL,
she has built up various in-house programmes, including the Professional Development
Programme–Teaching (PDP-T), the Teaching Assistants Programme (TAP), the Student
Workshop series and CDTL’s education conference series Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (TLHE). In addition to these programmes, CDTL has also released many publications, including CDTLink, CDTL Brief and Ideas on Teaching.

I wish to record my gratitude to Daphne for providing me with a foundation to build on and to
extend the CDTL mission. For a start, I wish to share with you some of these plans that I would like to implement at CDTL. I welcome your ideas and feedback on any of these initiatives that I am outlining below, because CDTL is not about me— it is about all of us and what we share as NUS academics.

CDTL frequently receives many foreign visitors. Within my first four months as Director, CDTL
has hosted visitors from Australia, Denmark, Ireland, Philippines and South Korea, and we will
be receiving another set of visitors from Canada this month. I am constantly amazed by how much these visitors wish us to share our expertise with them, and they often express their envy that we have so many established programmes and resources dedicated to promoting good teaching at NUS. Many of these visitors have also urged CDTL to engage in regular sharing of information with them. With such requests in mind, here is something I have on
my wish list for CDTL—to establish a teaching exchange scheme during my term as Director. First, I will need to obtain the funds that will enable our colleagues to do short teaching-related visits to other campuses or at centres similar to CDTL, where they have the opportunity to share their teaching expertise and also gain from observing how other
people teach in different settings. At the same time, I am envisioning this scheme to allow for foreign colleagues to make similar visits to NUS to give us the benefit of their teaching expertise. I see such a scheme serving at least two important functions for us—as an outreach effort to showcase our own expertise, and as a platform to effect teaching exchange. If you have thoughts about how this idea can be usefully developed, feel free to contact me at CDTL!

The above proposed scheme, when approved, will surely extend our reach and benefit us as teachers and educators. I am also considering initiatives that will enhance our students’ learning. CDTL has organised many workshops for undergraduate students in the past. In the first quarter of this academic year, we held two student dialogues with the Vice Provost
(Education), Professor Tan Thiam Soon. I am also hoping to enrich and extend the Student Workshop series in at least two ways: (1) to introduce academic dimensions to our students’ learning at NUS; and (2) to have more targeted workshops that will help our graduate student population. What I have in mind is to introduce more research skills-related training for our students; to gather students together for focused group or roundtable discussions on issues that are important to their academic or professional development; and to generally focus on their needs as learners in a tertiary context. Again, I welcome your input and your help in realising this plan.

Before I conclude my message, I would like to share some thoughts about one of our CDTL
publications, CDTL Brief. You will know that the Brief has always been a hard copy publication.
Following discussions with the CDTL publication team, we are experimenting with a new format for subsequent issues. From 2009, CDTL Brief will become an online publication—in part to help save the environment, and also to make it an online platform for colleagues to exchange ideas about teaching and education. I am envisioning the online Brief to be the space where we share ideas about teaching, and to discuss and debate about issues that are important to us. I wish for the Brief to become a platform where conversations about teaching will take place, and ideas are generated, given time to air and to stew. The online Brief therefore invites not just your contributions, but also welcomes your responses to specific contributions. I hope this modest ‘revamp’ of a long-established CDTL publication will generate new excitement for collegial teaching exchange.

I will have opportunity to share more plans with you as the year unfolds. I am just a phone call or email away; feel free to contact me if you have ideas on teaching and learning that you wish to share with me. I look forward to working with you in 2009 and wish all of you a wonderful year ahead.