Blended Learning for the Liberal Arts-based University Scholars’ Programme (USP) of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU)

NTU is implementing Team-Based Learning (TBL) pedagogy to many of its programmes, starting with the School of Medicine, the Renaissance Engineering Programme and now with the USP. TBL is a blended and flipped-classroom methodology wherein the students download information that they would have received through a lecture at home using a combination of video lectures, PowerPoint slides, journals and linked websites prior to coming to classroom. The face-to-face portion is spent mainly on intra-team and inter-team discussions based on real-life exercises that are governed by the 4 ‘S’ principles: Significant problem; Same problem; Simultaneous reveal of answers; and Specific choice. There are several challenges to the implementation of this blended learning pedagogy. Regarding pre-learning materials, the lecturer has less control of over both what content students choose to study and how much. In the face-to-face sessions, the TBL implementation poses a challenge to the liberal arts educators, particularly in executing the “Specific choice” requirement. In other disciplines such as medicine, and less so, in engineering, Specific choice is demonstrated by using multiple choice, single best answer format. This may not be optimal in the usual discussion-based, quantitative critical analysis-driven liberal arts discipline. A special TBL workshop will be organised consisting of interdisciplinary faculty, to identify major challenges and to propose solutions to these problems. This presentation describes the process, challenges and solutions in the implementation of the blended learning TBL approach to the teaching of the liberal arts in NTU