On the morning of April 2, Doctor Hong Huaqing from Nanyang Technological University delivered a speech entitled “Big Data Approaches to Teaching and Learning in Singapore Schools” at the 8^th Translation Forum for MA Students. This forum was chaired by Professor Mo Aiping, the director of Center for Translation Studies.

       

In the beginning of this forum, Prof. Mo awarded Mr. Hong a letter of appointment for his contribution to the center and made a brief introduction to his educational background and research interests. Hong began his speech with John Dewey’s famous saying“If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow”. This saying inspired the attendants to reflect on the demerits of the traditional teacher-based model, which, according to him, can not meet the educational demands of the information age. He then analyzed the efforts that Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press has made to transform its teaching model and stressed that its failure to meet the challenges of today’s education can be attributable to its inefficient technology-based teaching.

Then, he put emphasis on “sequenced learning”, which is both popular and efficient in Singapore schools. This model requires students to familiarize themselves with the learning tasks, make efficient use of the available learning resources, and finally build up their own learning framework. Also, he made a detailed introduction to the management of digitalized teaching resources, and took the success of this model in the Medical School of Nanyang Technological University as an example to illustrate the importance of big data in the present age.

He finally proposed his views on the development of future teaching models and concluded with Einstein’s famous remark “if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid”. His excellent speech won warm applauses.