Page 20 - Ideas
P. 20
The growth of a programme depends on the reputation
of the institution and how interesting the programme
curriculum is. Associate Professor Michelle Cheong, who
is the Associate Dean overseeing Postgraduate
Professional Education programmes, including the Master
of IT in Business (MITB) programme, faces this challenge
of ensuring the MITB programme continues to grow. “IT
programmes are generally harder to sell than business
programmes, so we have to work harder to attract
students,” Michelle said, “and one way is to make sure
that the curriculum remains solid and interesting.” Hence,
her thoughts constantly revolve around how to attract
quality students to study IT and have fun at the same
time. “For the past ten years, we have grown quite a bit,
probably because every faculty is being pushed to
enhance the programme to become better and better,”
Michelle commented.
Small steps in the journey of innovation
Michelle CHEONG
Associate Professor of Information Systems A few years ago, the idea of employing blended learning
School of Information Systems to deliver some course segments within the programme
Singapore Management University was mooted. Michelle decided to start small by first
experimenting with a single module in her course, using
“Students want to learn, so they will definitely benefit Lectora authoring tool and simple voice recording to
more from these tools because they can use the tools produce an online learning courseware. It was produced
repeatedly to explore the contents, calculations and
decision-making over and over again.” in-house and Michelle was pleasantly surprised by the
quality of the eventual outcome. That encouraged her to
expand her use of technology to include animation
enhanced with fun elements for two more modules.
