LIOW Chee Hsiang and Julian AZFAR
Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health

In this post, Chee Hsiang and Julian share how they mitigate challenges posed in three teaching contexts—online lectures, group work, and presentations. Chee Hsiang was also one of the panellists of the session on “Educators’ Challenges and Successes” at the e-learning Symposium 2020, held on 8 June 2020.

 

“I’m a pretty tech-savvy guy. So when it was announced that we’re to move into e-learning, I thought it was going to be a piece of cake.

I mean, how complicated can it be? Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Panopto…it’s just a matter of getting familiar with how it works, what to click, what not to click… piece of cake.

Or so I thought.

It turned out the cake wasn’t presented on a dessert dish. I didn’t expect I had to bake the cake as well.”
– Chee Hsiang

In summary, just as “a knife doesn’t make the chef”, online teaching tools do not make the educator. Pedagogy still and must guide how we teach, not the hardware. We are cognisant that the above ideas are not exhaustive and we look forward to hearing from you!

LIOW Chee Hsiang is currently the Vice-Dean (Education) at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health. He had worked for 14 years in the area of global health in Southwest China and the Greater Mekong Region before joining NUS four years ago. He currently teaches global health, programme design and evaluation to undergraduate Medical, undergraduate Public Health Minor and Master of Public Health students. Chee Hsiang can be reached at liowcheehsiang@nus.edu.sg.

Julian AZFAR is an instructor at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, where he leads and teaches General Education courses. He has an interest in interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary teaching and learning, and is excited about understanding how the perspectives and pedagogies of educators are inherently shaped by their own backgrounds and socio-cultural contexts. Julian can be reached at ephjam@nus.edu.sg.