Blended synchronous learning (BSL) is a learning approach where students can participate in classroom learning activities at geographically separated locations such as homes using real-time video conferencing. In recent years, BSL has attracted increasing attention as it has shown many educational benefits. For instance, students can enjoy the convenience and flexibility of online learning, authentic classroom atmosphere, and high social presence of the instructor and classmates. It also has the possibility to maintain the continuity of education when schools are closed in extreme crisis conditions such as the recent Covid-19 pandemic. However, the cognitive engagement of online students is often lower than that of classroom students, and it is also hard to observe if online students are cognitively engaged as the social cues are heavily missing. Therefore, effectively promoting, sustaining, and monitoring the cognitive engagement of online students in a blended synchronous learning environment (BSLE) becomes essential. 

The primary purpose of this study is to identify design principles and instructional strategies which can be used to effectively promote the cognitive engagement of online students. The subjects of the study will be NIE PGDE pre-service student teachers, in-service school teachers taking the Masters of Education (MEd) programme, and the instructors who are teaching them. An initial set of design principles and instructional strategies will be proposed and tested with the student teachers at NIE. For instance, one design principle will be both online and classroom students should be equally engaged, and a strategy is letting the online student lead and moderate group collaboration and give a presentation. Principles and strategies will be revised and improved by following the design-based

research approach.

Sustaining cognitive engagement is also important as any learning difficulty or technical problem may cause online students frustrated or disengaged. Being temporarily engaged at a moment does not mean they are engaged all the time. Certain instructional strategies such as regularly interacting with the online students by asking questions and frequently browsing the posts in the chatbox can help to keep the students engaged. In addition, students are often more highly engaged at the beginning of using technologies and gradually lose the novelty effect after a period. Strategies such as continuous e-assessment can be applied to sustain their engagement.

Furthermore, how to monitor students’ cognitive engagement is equally crucial. The lack of facial cues, eye contact, and body language often makes the teacher hard to detect if online students are engaged. Students often turn off their cameras to avoid being observed. Using a survey at the end of a course is retrospective and hard to reflect their real-time engagement. Strategies such as prompting them to indicate their engagement levels irregularly during a lesson can help monitor their cognitive engagement. In addition, facial expression recognition and analysis (FERA) tools are useful for detecting student engagement in real time. FERA will be explored in this proposed project to help track in-process cognitive engagement.

This study will follow the design-based research approach and progress through three rounds of prototyping and a PD stage at NIE. The participants of the prototyping stage are student teachers from the PGDE and MEd programmes. PD sessions will be conducted for NIE faculty, in-service school teachers, and lecturers from other institutes to increase their competency in the design and implementation of BSL. 

Blended synchronous learning (BSL) is a learning approach where students can participate in classroom learning activities at geographically separated locations such as homes using real-time video conferencing. In recent years, BSL has attracted increasing attention as it has shown many educational benefits. For instance, students can enjoy the convenience and flexibility of online learning, authentic classroom atmosphere, and high social presence of the instructor and classmates. It also has the possibility to maintain the continuity of education when schools are closed in extreme crisis conditions such as the recent Covid-19 pandemic. However, the cognitive engagement of online students is often lower than that of classroom students, and it is also hard to observe if online students are cognitively engaged as the social cues are heavily missing. Therefore, effectively promoting, sustaining, and monitoring the cognitive engagement of online students in a blended synchronous learning environment (BSLE) becomes essential. 

The primary purpose of this study is to identify design principles and instructional strategies which can be used to effectively promote the cognitive engagement of online students. The subjects of the study will be NIE PGDE pre-service student teachers, in-service school teachers taking the Masters of Education (MEd) programme, and the instructors who are teaching them. An initial set of design principles and instructional strategies will be proposed and tested with the student teachers at NIE. For instance, one design principle will be both online and classroom students should be equally engaged, and a strategy is letting the online student lead and moderate group collaboration and give a presentation. Principles and strategies will be revised and improved by following the design-based

research approach.

Sustaining cognitive engagement is also important as any learning difficulty or technical problem may cause online students frustrated or disengaged. Being temporarily engaged at a moment does not mean they are engaged all the time. Certain instructional strategies such as regularly interacting with the online students by asking questions and frequently browsing the posts in the chatbox can help to keep the students engaged. In addition, students are often more highly engaged at the beginning of using technologies and gradually lose the novelty effect after a period. Strategies such as continuous e-assessment can be applied to sustain their engagement.

Furthermore, how to monitor students’ cognitive engagement is equally crucial. The lack of facial cues, eye contact, and body language often makes the teacher hard to detect if online students are engaged. Students often turn off their cameras to avoid being observed. Using a survey at the end of a course is retrospective and hard to reflect their real-time engagement. Strategies such as prompting them to indicate their engagement levels irregularly during a lesson can help monitor their cognitive engagement. In addition, facial expression recognition and analysis (FERA) tools are useful for detecting student engagement in real time. FERA will be explored in this proposed project to help track in-process cognitive engagement.

This study will follow the design-based research approach and progress through three rounds of prototyping and a PD stage at NIE. The participants of the prototyping stage are student teachers from the PGDE and MEd programmes. PD sessions will be conducted for NIE faculty, in-service school teachers, and lecturers from other institutes to increase their competency in the design and implementation of BSL. 

• The project developed a Zoom extension that allows real-time streaming of the active speaker’s video feed in an online synchronous lesson into machine learning models hosted on AWS for facial emotion and speech emotion recognition without requiring participants to install any external software. The Zoom extension leverages on Zoom’s new experimental real-time media streams (RTMS) technology to seamlessly stream the active speaker’s video feed into any backend systems.

• The project also developed a web-based dashboard to visualise in real-time, the analytical outputs from the machine learning models to provide live alerts on the emotional state of active speaking students in the online synchronous lessons.

• The dashboard also allows for post-class analysis for exploring the peaks and dips across the different emotional states across the class timeline for both the entire class and individual students to review significant moments that happened in the lesson. 

Pedagogically driven collaborative technologies for higher education have been gaining its deserved attention. Educators have highlighted the need for a radical shift away from standard transmission model of simply passing on knowledge or information to learners. New pedagogical approaches that afford learners to engage actively as participants in interactive tasks and constructive knowledge creation have been increasingly explored through collaborative technologies. Students enrolled in higher educational courses are also introduced to pragmatic pedagogical approaches, using case-studies as a setting for analysis. Through case-based learning, students can discuss, role-play, interpret, conceptualise, inquire about new knowledge and clarify complexities of practices. The challenge put forward for this study is to evaluate how to enhance learner engagements and improve learning outcomes in Case-based Collaborative Learning (CBCL) online, through dialogic analysis for better understanding of learners’ interactions.

Two cycles of iterations will be conducted, leveraging on the natural academic calendar spanning 2 years offerings of the module. In the first iteration, groups of learners will be given case study scenarios on Information Systems control and audit using Google Docs, where they discuss, debate and give their views of the cases via comments based on control and audit process. Dialogic analysis of interaction among these learners will result in the development of models which will uncover and explain how different interaction patterns correspond to student engagements and learning outcomes. The second iteration will test the effectiveness of CBCL-specific instructional

strategies as interventions towards inducing normative interactions, and examine if learner engagements are enhanced and learning outcomes are improved. Research and development work on automated analytical tools for dialogic schemes characterisation will be done.​ 

Video conferencing has the potential to combine the positive features of face-to-face (f2f) learning and online learning. This project aims to explore how to effectively design and conduct live video conferencing sessions in a blended learning course. More specifically, this project investigates how to conduct video conferencing in different settings, what challenges teachers and students may face, and teachers’  and students’ perceptions such as their satisfaction, time commitment, technical problems and difficulties met and support needed. The project is conducted in a master course at NIE. The settings of conducting video conferencing include: i) teacher’s online presentation to a whole class; ii) individual students’ online sharing with the rest of the class; iii) broadcasting an f2f session, where a small number of students (3-4) are present, to a large population (around 30) online; and iv) a few students (3-4) joining a live f2f session at remote places. The video conferencing tool will be Zoom.us. The project lasts for two semesters. In the first semester, 4 sessions use video conferencing for an hour each. Feedback are collected at the end of each session. Strategies used in various settings are revised at the end of the semester and tested again in the following semester. Based on the observation and feedback collected, effective strategies for designing, preparing, and delivering video conferencing sessions are summarized and implications for integrating video conferencing into blended learning courses are suggested.

The goals of the 3rd Masterplan For ICT in Education (MP3) as articulated by the Ministry of Education in 2009 are: (1) Students will possess competencies for self-directed and collaborative learning through the effective use of ICT as well as become discerning and responsible ICT users; and (2) Teachers will have the capacity to plan and deliver ICT-enriched learning experiences for students to become self-directed and collaborative learners, as well as to nurture students to become discerning and responsible ICT users; (3) School leaders will provide the direction and create the conditions to harness ICT for teaching and learning; and (4) The ICT infrastructure will support teaching and learning anywhere, anytime. To assess the progress of Singapore schools towards the actualization of the four stated goals, this evaluation study was commissioned by MOE ETD. The evaluation study adopts a mixed-method design: A repeated cross sectional design complemented by case studies of selected schools.

This study aims to investigate beginning teachers' classroom management using their own cases to initiate them into collaborative case-based learning. Classroom management is a critical component for teacher learning in both pre-service teacher education and in-service teacher professional development. This study aims to explore teacher-generated classroom management cases in Singapore secondary schools; analyze beginning teachers' classroom management approaches to emerging classroom management problems; uncover beginning teachers' management beliefs, concepts and practices; and explore the feasibility of implementing case-based learning in teacher education.

 This mixed-method study aims to investigate beginning teachers' classroom management using their own cases to initiate them into collaborative case-based learning. In NIE, classroom management is a critical component for teacher learning in both pre-service teacher education (e.g. core module) and in-service teacher professional development (e.g. Beginning Teachers' Courses). It is believed to lay the foundation of teachers' conceptual understanding, principles and practices that are necessary for their effective teaching in schools. However, beginning teachers' challenges found within their classrooms have demonstrated the disparity between their prior learning at NIE and current classroom management practices in schools. This has led to the need to re-examine how teachers learn, how classroom management is currently taught and whether the existing curriculum is relevant for the beginning teachers when they position themselves in the reality of 21st century classrooms. In reality, all classroom situations are complex and ill-structured such that no direct solution can be obtained from books which have led us to seeking alternative learning and teaching paths for the teachers. To date, no local studies have focussed on exploring alternative approaches for teacher learning in classroom management. Current empirical research efforts are largely concentrated on the teachers' and students' perceptions in problematic and disciplinary classrooms rather than in the teachers' learning of actual management of the classroom environment in Singapore context (Ang et al, 2007; Chong et al, 2007; Lacina-Gifford, Kher & Besant, 2003; Quek, 2009; Yeo et al, 2007). Empirical studies have shown that case-based or case method teaching is an effective pedagogical approach adopted in fields such as business, education, law, medicine and e-learning (e.g. Angeli, 2004; Bronack, 1999; Chen, Wu & Yang, 2008; Choi & Lee, 2008; Gartland & Katsikitis, 2001; Hay & Katsikitis, 2001; Jonessen and Erdelez, 2005; Kilbane, 2001; Kimball, 1995;Kolodner, 2006; McNaught, Lau, Lam, Hui & Au, 2005; Mitchem, Fitzgerald, Hollingsead, Koury, Miller & Tsai, 2008; Pillar, 2002; Shulman,1992; Silverman, 1996). However, it is seldom applied formally in Singapore's teacher education. Building on the notion of social constructivism (Vygotsky, 1978), case-based or case method learning indeed represents a paradigm shift towards a more active, collaborative and inquiry-based approach to teacher education in Singapore. The classroom is indeed teachers' immediate environment for learning because this is where they spend most of their time and effort in activities such as teaching and interacting with students. The classroom thus presents the natural context for teachers to anchor their learning by documenting classroom cases (e.g. narrated classroom situations encountered, their classroom actions and reactions). Teacher-generated classroom case studies are selected in this study because these are teachers' classroom encounters examined from their perspectives. We believe that these are representative learning resources that (1) depict a big picture of classroom reality in Singapore schools (2) provide an insight to learners' representation of what they make sense of their immediate classroom happenings (3) communicate learners' beliefs, perspectives and assumptions of their management practices (4) describe beginning teachers' classroom management concerns and issues experienced (5) support learners' critical self-examination, self-reflection and self-awareness of their management practices (Harrington at al, 1996) (6) support learners' skills in problem solving, collaborative and risk-taking from their immediate environment and strive towards self-improvement in managing their classrooms (Morrison, 2001) (7) support learners taking up of personal responsibility for learning.

Private tuition is a worldwide phenomenon that has great impacts on a country’s education. To better understand the phenomenon, most research studies see tuition as a social product due to educational demands which gives rise to inquiries that are mainly empirical. An

alternative view to this is that private tuition is a tool used by students to extend performance capacities in order to gain academic advantages. Seeing it in this light, it is possible to develop theoretical understanding for the tuition phenomena using known theories.

Facebook is a free and new web-based social networking site (SNS). Its primary purpose is to provide a virtual space for users to make new friends and interact with them. Nowadays, many young people have Facebook accounts and use Facebook to communicate with their friends. In NIE, more than half of the PGDE student teachers I taught this semester have their own Facebook accounts and have experience using this web-based tool. Given this conducive background, it would be useful to capitalize on its existing usage and extend its potential to teaching and learning. Also, Facebook has potential for teaching and learning. At present, there are very few known empirical studies conducted on the use of Facebook in education. This makes it more imperative to conduct research into the affordances of Facebook for teaching and learning especially in the area of collaborative learning.

Although Singapore students regularly rank at the top of international competitions in mathematics and science, they are often considered as passive, quiet, and lacking thinking and leadership skills (cf. Warschauer, 2001). How to promote students' critical thinking becomes crucial in the Singapore education. In recent years, the use of weblogs has attracted numerous people's attention, and a large number of weblogs have been created on the Internet. However, very little research on the use of weblogs for teaching and learning in primary or secondary schools has been conducted. In this research, secondary school students wrote online reflections in weblogs by following three different approaches: i) without ongoing scaffolding; ii) peer review; and iii) teacher feedback. We examined how to effectively promote students' critical thinking by using weblogs on the secondary school level.

The NGIT (Next Generation Interactive Textbook) project was started in July 2011 and end in Jan 2012.  The NIE lecturers/professors were invited to evaluate the pilot implementation of the NGIT programme in the learning of Physics lessons.  Six schools were invited to participate; involving 7 classes with a total of 14 teachers.  Each class typically had a main teacher and a co-teacher. The Normal Technical (NT) classes were selected to participate in this pilot study.  The data collection period spanned 12 weeks in total.  The lesson observations began in Term 3 and ended at the beginning of Term 4.