A Recipe for a Balanced Education

When Pascale Crama first considered moving to Singapore after completing her PhD at London Business School, it was in search of an adventure. “I knew I wanted to stay in academia. My younger brother had recently moved to Asia (South Korea) and as such had opened up my interest in moving to that part of the world,” says the Associate Professor of Operations Management at the Singapore Management University (SMU) Lee Kong Chian School of Business (LKCSB).

And it seems that Professor Crama had uncovered plenty of thrills in the Lion City, as she remained in Singapore for the next 11 years. “There is such a great cultural diversity here as manifested in the local food, celebrations, and my colleagues and neighbours. People are also really nice: they love kids, they’re always up for a talk, someone even picked up my handbag when I lost it and met me at an MRT station to return it to me,” says the professor.

For her, integration into the education system has been a breeze, and teaching local undergraduates and managing the university’s programme has been a rich and rewarding journey.

“Singaporean undergrads are a lot more hardworking than we were! The teaching style is also very different at SMU, and students can't just show up and sit quietly taking notes: they have to participate and get their voices heard. When I remember how daunting it was to speak up in class at university, I think this really trains them to be confident and willing to put themselves out there,” describes Professor Crama.

As a professor, she is also constantly seeking new methods of teaching that will keep the school’s programme current and on trend. One of her greatest interests lies in blended learning, and developing ways to combine digital and traditional learning to be more efficient, effective, and modern.

“For the past few years, SMU has been pushing towards a better use of online learning tools to improve our students' learning experience and augment our face-to-face teaching. This latest venture is more exciting and more radical, as it tries to move the learning fully online through multiple online tools and with demonstrated pedagogical value,” explains the professor.

One of the benefits of online courses, she points out, is that “the students will get faster feedback, while also generating a detailed learner's profile that will allow the faculty to better assess how the concepts are being learned.”

Professor Crama’s interest in blended learning came about as she was examining her own teaching experience and realised some parts of her lessons could have been automated.  

“I started using a simulation in class, and realised how much students enjoyed it and how engaging they found it. However, I felt that online learning centred around watching videos and discussion boards do not really work. So once I saw the platform that we are now using for blended learning, where we can create different activities tailored to get across the lessons from the class, I realised that this was finally a tool that would really enable online learning,” she says.

Through the years of implementation and fine-tuning through feedback from both teachers and students, Professor Crama hopes that blended learning will continue to improve students’ learning experiences and keep the curriculum up-to-date, while also providing undergraduates with a more holistic educational journey.

However, no matter how well the course is designed, she feels that the onus remains on students to maximise their own learning. “I think that the blended format lends itself extremely well to peer-to-peer learning and students should leverage on the knowledge of their peers to create a deeper learning experience for themselves. Ultimately, like any course, the student will only get as much out of the course as they put in themselves,” advises the professor.