September 30, 2022NUS CDTL

A Conversation with 2022 Outstanding Educator Award (OEA) Recipient Mr Donn Koh

Mr Donn KOH
Division of Industrial Design (DID),
College of Design & Engineering (CDE)

In this episode, we speak with Mr Donn Koh, recipient of the 2022 Outstanding Educator Award (OEA), where he shares about fostering a culture of reflection and authentic dialogue with his students in his design courses.

Don

We are pleased to have Mr Donn Koh, recipient of the 2022 Outstanding Educator Award (OEA), join us on this podcast, where he shares aspects of his teaching practice, in particular how he applied authentic learning as a key approach towards building a learning environment that is conducive towards engendering reflective and authentic dialogue for his design students.

Some of the conversation points in this episode include the following:

listen to Part 1 (19min 46sec)

  • On what prompted Donn to focus on authentic learning as an outcome for his students (00:25)
  • Strategies Donn develops and implements to enable effective authentic dialogue to take place in his classes (08:29)
  • On the challenges of implementing authentic learning activities in large classes (11:41)

Listen to Part 2 (23min 50sec) | FULL TRANSCRIPT

  • On maintaining healthy boundaries and work-life balance as an educator (19:53; 33:45)
  • On the benefits and challenges of incorporating subjectivity and uncertainty in assessment (25:51)

This episode is chaired by Dr Lee Li Neng, Associate Director of the Centre for Development of Teaching and Learning (CDTL). Donn’s OEA Public Lecture was held on 21 September 2022.

Click on the image below to listen to the podcast:

podcast
Click here for a transcript of the podcast.

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Donn KOH is a Senior Lecturer from the Division of Industrial Design (DID) at the College of Design & Engineering (CDE).

An educator with DID for over 10 years, Donn is also the co-founder of STUCK Design, an award-winning creative agency in Singapore whose mantra is to “make things people love.” Mr Koh’s projects have won many awards – the BraunPrize, Good Design Award, IDEA Gold. His award-winning designs include the Microsoft Arc Touch Mouse, Air+ Smart Mask, and the HTC Evo 4G.

Mr Koh is passionate about design and in teaching others to design, mentoring many designers who are now working in Accenture, IBM, Zendesk, LinkedIn, Grab, DBS, Google and STUCK Design. He believes that there is so much human potential untapped in each person, and finds it meaningful to help individuals to overcome crippling self-beliefs and misconceptions, especially about creativity.

Donn can be reached at donn@nus.edu.sg.

 

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