SINGAPORE COURSES HIT THE MARK “Graduates have established a reputation with employers, recruiters and government as skilled, industry-ready workers.” The University of Wollongong has long-standing partnerships with two of Singapore’s leading private higher education colleges, the Singapore Institute of Management (SIM) and the PSB Academy.
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UOW works with these two long-established Singapore education and training institutions to deliver internationally- recognised academic programs in business, information technology and, more recently, psychology.
TEACHING TESOL IN THAILAND “We created a fly-in, fly-out model for our lecturers that works really well to complement the work of the tutors in Thailand.” ducation academics in UOW’s Faculty of Social Sciences have had a long and close association with Thailand, sending trainee teachers there for practical training for more than 20 years.
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More than 2000 students have graduated from UOW-SIM specialised information technology bachelor degree programs since 2005 while UOW has been offering business programs at PSB since 2008. PSB Academy was formerly part of the Productivity and Standards Board of Singapore, and has been instrumental in stimulating productivity improvement and innovation within the country’s workforce. UOW offers full-time and part-time business programs through PSB in select undergraduate majors, with graduates progressing into some of Singapore’s leading national and international corporations. Singapore’s Economic Development Board established SIM in 1964 to fulfil a national mission to train and build a pool of highly skilled managers to support Singapore’s economic goals. Today, SIM is the largest private education institution in Singapore.
The program is delivered jointly by Assumption and UOW academics. Tutors from Assumption provide the tutorials while UOW lecturers travel to Thailand to deliver intensive sections of the course, while also providing on-line support to the students through the Faculty’s welldeveloped distance education systems. UOW also provides the Quality Assurance oversight to ensure the graduates qualify for a UOW degree.
In recent years UOW has extended the relationship to include the delivery of a Master of Education degree in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL) in a joint program with Assumption University in Bangkok.
Assumption University’s Associate Professor Linchong Chorrojprasert, who graduated with a Master of Education from UOW in 2005 and heads UOW’s Thai Alumni Chapter, played a key role in establishing the UOW-Assumption TESOL Masters program. She said the program was designed to help Thai English teachers become better teachers through their contact with the Australian lecturers.
The Masters program is targeted at English Language teachers at Thai high schools, to give them advanced strategies and methodologies to improve their teaching skills.
The first students were all teaching English at St Gabriel’s College in Bangkok. “(Through this course) they have been doing much more than learning from books,” Professor Chorrojprasert
There are more than 1000 students currently enrolled in the UOW programs offered at SIM Global Education in various specialised information technology and computer science courses, as well as the recent addition of psychology. Since UOW established its alliance with SIM in 2005, graduates have established a reputation with employers, recruiters and government as skilled, industry-ready workers with the flexibility and confidence to adapt to the everchanging technological and business landscape. A number of government agencies support the courses through internships and scholarships, including the Centre for Strategic Infocomm Technologies within the Ministry of Defence, which supports students undertaking the digital systems security major within the UOW Bachelor of Computer Science degree.
said. “They have been living the (English) language, and are much more confident, and have gained experience in the theory and new technologies of language teaching.” UOW Associate Professor Ian Brown describes the TESOL Masters program as an excellent example of international collaboration between two organisations. “We created a fly-in, fly-out model for our lecturers that works really well to complement the work of the tutors in Thailand,” Professor Brown said. “We feel this course has a very promising future.”
Thai Master of Education graduates from the first cohort of students who undertook the Teaching English as a Second Language program, came to Wollongong for their graduation ceremony in 2012 with some of their tutors. They are pictured with (front centre, from left) UOW’s Associate Professor Ian Brown, St Gabriel’s College Director Reverend Brother Dr Anusak Nidhibhadrebhorn and Assumption University’s Associate Professor Linchong Chorrojprasert.