NTU-Imperial Education Fund Past Recipients

Project Title: Unleashing the Power of Collaboration and Cutting-Edge Technologies: Building a Sustainable Future through Digital Analytics
 
NTU PI: Dr Liu Siyuan, School of Computer Science and Engineering
Imperial PI: Dr Esma Koca, Analytics, Marketing and Operations

The collaborative project between Imperial College Business School (ICBS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) aims to enhance global sustainability understanding by creating an interdisciplinary online module on “Analytics for Society”, focusing on the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals. Talented groups of Business and Computer Science students from respective institutions will collaborate to develop diverse sessions specialising on how to use domain-specific digital analytics knowledge to achieve a sustainable development goal.

The project will enable students to actively participate in the learning process and engage with course content in an autonomous way to create interactive digital learning materials. By involving students in the co-creation process of these materials, the project has the potential to catalyse a transformation in teaching practices. The shift towards a more collaborative and student-centred approach allows us to further relinquish the traditional role of the sole knowledge provider and instead become facilitators of learning.

The resulting module will be publicly accessible, raising awareness and fostering a global understanding of sustainability challenges. The successful development of the collaborative module will open avenues for the creation of a joint program focused on Analytics for Society, fostering ongoing cross-institutional collaboration and knowledge exchange.

Project Title: Learning analytics and data literacy
(click here for project outcome)

NTU PI: Dr Lim Fun Siong, Applications of Teaching & Learning Analytics for Students (ATLAS)
Imperial PI: Dr Camille Kandiko Howson, Centre for Higher Education Research and Scholarship

This project is a partnership between Imperial College and NTU to develop learning analytics data literacy materials to support staff and students in understanding how to support student learning with data and learning analytics. This project is co-led by students and would focus on best practices and ethics for interpreting and using learning analytics to support student success.

Imperial College and NTU aim to share ideas relating best practices in learning analytics. With students from both institutions as co-collaborators, the team would get to explore how different organisations go about meeting legal requirements as well as pedagogical and ethical considerations in learning analytics. These efforts would culminate into two joint conferences and a suite of communication and education materials for NTU staff and student. We anticipate that these efforts would result in positive changes in how student data is used to improve teaching and learning at NTU.

Project Title: Health and Sustainability
(click here for project outcome) 

NTU PI: Nurliyana Daros, Interdisciplinary Collaborative Core Office (ICC) 
Imperial PI: Dr Mark Pope, Centre for Languages, Culture and Communication 

The Health and Sustainability project, a collaboration between NTU-Imperial College London, aims to integrate humanity-centered design principles into the fields of health, education, and sustainability while fostering a livable ecosystem for future generations. It seeks to address real-world challenges through a process of interdisciplinary collaboration and design thinking.  

The project consists of four main components: the development of online resources for co-creative design and learning, incubator workshops facilitated by student co-learners and peer facilitators, sharing sessions with industry experts, and a design-a-thon where students from NTU and Imperial College London work in teams. 

The project aims to provide a sandbox for students to harness creative confidence as agents of change, and develop new insights related to health and sustainability in Singapore and the United Kingdom. At the core of navigating such complexities are transferable competencies that include critical thinking, creative confidence, design thinking, and self-directed learning.     

Project Title: Establishment of the Imperial-NTU Food Student Research Network Partnership
(click here for project outcome)

NTU PI: A/Prof Yusuf Ali, Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (LKCMedicine)
Imperial PI:  Dr Aaron M. Lett, Department of Metabolism, Digestion and Reproduction
Imperial Co-PI: Dr Richard Bale, Centre for Higher Education Research and Scholarship

The emphasis of this seed-funded project is to: 1) Establish an NTU-FSRN (based on Imperial-FSRN model) i.e. SRN model transposition 2) Once established, a secondary focus will be on creating a digital mode-of-operation for partner events between Imperial-FSRN and NTU-FSRN through jointly hosting a hybrid-online conference as an initial test event. This could be via Teams or Zoom, for example.

The project will develop infrastructure and learning for future Imperial-NTU-FSRN partnership online events, which will be hosted annually.

Project Title: Co-production of neuroscience of learning resources for asynchronous teaching
(click here for project outcome) 

NTU PI: Dr Astrid Schmied, National Institute of Education (NIE)
Imperial PI: Dr Iro Ntonia, Centre for HE Research and Scholarship

This collaboration between faculty and students across both institutions, NTU and Imperial College, aims to co-produce and bring to life two educationally relevant lessons on key neuroscience of learning topics: attention and memory. Strategically, the core idea is for these lessons to not only act like whistle-stop introductions to content, but also to be used across both institutions. To accomplish this goal, the co-production is intentionally directed such a way where the learning experience would be equally accessible by students at either Imperial College or NTU, regardless of the students’ background and level of study.

Project Title: Digital Twins for Blended Learning with Classroom Flipping
 
NTU PI: A/Prof Tan Chee Wei School of Computer Science and Engineering (SCSE)
Imperial PI: Prof Deniz Gunduz, Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department

This project proposes a tech-driven pedagogy to classroom flipping in which Imperial College and NTU students engage in interactive virtual learning, where the educator guides them to engage in the subject matter. Virtual learning by digital twins (i.e., a digital student peer with an AI chatbot interface) can harness the benefits of collaborative learning combined with low stakes assessment. 

This project aims to investigate:
       i.         whether a digital student peer can be constructed using machine learning models (digital twins) to promote collegial interaction between students at Imperial and NTU;
     ii.         how to enable blended online classroom flipping, originally designed for face-to-face learning environments, for a hybrid teaching environment with the digital twins.