Professor Christine Goh delivered the NIE Director’s Address 2020 on 4 September 2020. This year’s Address was recorded and streamed “live” from the NIE Block 1 Level 1 Conference Room to all NIE faculty and staff online, including adjuncts and part-time lecturers.

In line with this year’s central theme, “Our Heritage, Our Strengths, Our Future”, two NIE 70th Anniversary commemorative videos, “Walking Down Memory Lane” and “From Strength to Strength” were screened, along with a media clip of the NIE NTU Orchid, which was unveiled at the Istana by President Halimah Yacob the evening before.

Highlighting the “heart” in everything that NIE did, Professor Goh expressed her gratitude to all NIE faculty and staff for rising to unforeseen and rapidly-evolving challenges over the past 12 months. She thanked the NIE community for the smooth reopening of the campus and highlighted how teaching capabilities and facilities had been transformed to bolster blended learning.

The strong core values and hard work of the NIE community had also enabled the Institute to achieve significant strides in the three strategic areas of the NIE Strategic Vision 2022 (NIE 2022), namely Programmes and Research, Partnerships and Networks, and People and Institutional Capacity.

In particular, over the past year, NIE had stepped up collaborations with both MOE and NTU to implement significant new initiatives such as SkillsFuture for Educators (“SFEd”), a five-year professional development framework and roadmap for Singapore school teachers, and NTU MiniMasters, which aimed to support the endeavours of individuals to build their micro-credentials through Continuing Education and Training (CET). In line with the national “Learn for Life” movement, these initiatives would encourage more educators and working adults to embrace continuous lifelong learning as the economy transformed.

The inaugural NIE NEXUS Awards, aimed at promoting stronger interdisciplinary research collaboration, were announced. The two recipients were meriSTEM@NIE Singapore and the Multimodality Research Interest Group.

Professor Goh also unveiled five NIE-level strategic growth areas for the Institute to be known in over the next 10 years:

• Child and Human Development
• Values and Ethics
• Science of Learning
• Emerging Technologies
• Assessment and Evaluation

These key growth areas would allow for the focusing of resources and capacity building over the next decade in order to deliver future-ready initiatives for teaching and learning, education and disciplinary content research, as well as international outreach and reputation building.

In her concluding remarks, Professor Goh urged all colleagues to view the final implementation phase of NIE 2022 as the beginning of a new arc in NIE’s continuous growth and development as a future-ready institute, for which the NIE community would come together to author the new chapters.

If you missed the “live” address or would like to re-watch it, the full video recording of the NIE Director’s Address 2020 is available for viewing on the NIE Staff Portal.

While the pandemic will eventually come to pass, we need to continue to learn and cooperate on taking care of our only home—Earth. Given the unprecedented rate and scale that climate change related issues are occurring, there is an urgency to provide our children with a sound education on climate change. For our sustainable future depends on how well we prepare our children today.

The NTU MiniMasters has been replaced by the NTU FlexiMasters from 28 Oct 2021.