Tag: Singapore

  • Global lessons for the UK: how Singapore and India are embedding AI in education

    Global lessons for the UK: how Singapore and India are embedding AI in education

    This blog was kindly authored by Dr Karryl Kim Sagun Trajano (Research Fellow, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Dr Gayatri Devi Pillai (Assistant Professor, HHMSPB NSS College for Women, Trivandrum), Professor Mohanan Pillai (Pondicherry University), Dr Hillary Briffa (Senior Lecturer, Department of War Studies, KCL), Dr Anna Plunkett (Lecturer, Department of War Studies, KCL), Dr Ksenia Kirkham (Senior Lecturer, Department of War Studies, KCL),  Dr Özge Söylemez (Lecturer, Defence Studies Department, KCL), Dr Lucas Knotter (Lecturer, Department of Politics, Languages, and International Studies University of Bath), and Dr Chris Featherstone (Associate Lecturer, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of York).

    This blog draws on insights from the 2025 BISA-ISA joint Workshop on AI Pedagogies: Practice, Prompts and Problems in Contemporary Higher Education, sponsored by the ASPIRE (Academic Scholarship in Politics and International Relations Education) Network.

    As the UK continues to work out how best to regulate and support the use of AI in higher education, other countries have already begun to put their ideas into practice. Singapore and India, in particular, offer useful contrasts. Both link technological innovation to questions of social inclusion, though they do so in different ways: Singapore focuses on resilience and lifelong learning, while India emphasises access and the use of vernacular languages. Comparatively, their experiences show how education policy can harness AI to advance both innovation and inclusion, making technological progress a driver of social cohesion. British tertiary education institutions have, for a long time, drawn international lessons mainly from their close western neighbours, but it would be wise to broaden their horizons.

    Singapore: AI for resilience and lifelong learning

    Singapore’s approach to AI in education is rooted in its Smart Nation 2.0 vision, which emphasises the three goals of “Growth, Community and Trust”. The government aims to develop a digitally skilled workforce of 15,000 AI practitioners by 2027, linking education reform to national capability-building. Within this framework, AI pedagogy is closely tied to the idea of social resilience, which is understood in Singaporean policy as the capacity of society to remain cohesive, adaptable, and functional in the face of disruption.

    This vision is implemented through a coordinated ecosystem connecting local universities, AI Singapore (AISG), and the SkillsFuture programme. SkillsFuture uses AI-driven analytics to personalise re-skilling courses, design decision-making simulations, and encourage collaboration between government, industry, and academia. The Centre for Strategic Futures extends this agenda by promoting “AI for personal resilience”, framing digital competence as part of civic participation and collective preparedness.

    Even so, workshop discussions highlighted persistent challenges. Access to elite universities remains uneven, and foreign workers are largely excluded from many lifelong-learning initiatives. Participants also noted that AI training tends to focus on technical ability, leaving less room for ethical debate or critical reflection. To some extent, the drive to innovate has moved faster than efforts to make AI education fully inclusive or reflective.

    Singapore’s experience nonetheless illustrates how AI can be built into the wider social purpose of education. For the UK, it offers a reminder that digital innovation and civic responsibility can reinforce one another when universities treat learning as a public good. Graduates who understand both the capabilities and the limits of AI are better equipped to navigate complex socio-political, and technological environments. When built into lifelong-learning systems, AI education helps create the networks of knowledge and trust that make societies more adaptable and resilient.

    India: AI for inclusivity and vernacular access

    If Singapore shows what is possible through tight coordination in a small, centralised system, India demonstrates how the same principles are tested when applied across a country of continental scale and diversity. India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 sets out a comprehensive vision for transforming the education system to meet the demands of a rapidly changing global economy. It aims to raise the higher education gross enrolment ratio to 50% by 2035 and introduces flexible, learner-centred degree structures designed to encourage creativity and critical thinking. Artificial intelligence is central to this reform, “catalysing” both curricular innovation and system-wide modernisation.

    The National Digital Education Architecture (NDEAR) and the AI for All initiative embed AI within educational design and delivery. The University of Kerala’s Four-Year Undergraduate Programme (FYUGP), implemented under the NEP in 2024-25, is demonstrative of how these reforms are taking shape. AI tools now support continuous assessment, effectively and efficiently enabling educators to tailor material to individual learning needs and diverse assessment methods. These developments signal a wider shift in pedagogy, from one-off examinations toward continuous and formative evaluation that prioritises understanding and reflection.

    At the heart of the strategy lies India’s focus on linguistic and cultural inclusion. NEP 2020 mandates the use of regional languages in instruction and assessment, aligning with government programmes that promote vernacular content and accessible digital platforms. This multilingual approach helps extend higher education to students previously marginalised by linguistic barriers, while AI-assisted translation and adaptive interfaces further improve access for learners with disabilities.

    As with Singapore’s efforts, however, India’s reform agenda is not without its shortcomings. The NEP reflects the aspirations of a growing middle class and the logic of global competitiveness, raising concerns about commercialisation and uneven implementation, particularly at scale. Still, it represents one of the most ambitious efforts worldwide to connect digital innovation with social justice through deliberate policy design. For the UK, the lesson is clear: technological efficiency must be matched by cultural understanding and genuine inclusion, ensuring that advances in AI expand participation in higher education rather than deepen existing divides.

    Comparative insights for the UK

    Singapore and India approach AI in education from very different starting points, and each offers lessons worth considering. Singapore demonstrates the impact of close coordination between government and universities, supported by steady investment in applied research. India, meanwhile, is emblematic of how digital inclusion can extend beyond elite institutions when policy design takes account of linguistic diversity and regional inequality.

    For the UK, these examples point to a shared message: progress depends on coherence. Many initiatives already exist, from Joint Information Systems Committee Jisc’s advancement of the digital capabilities framework to Advance HE’s support to prepare for an AI-enabled future and the Russell Group’s guidance on generative AI, but they remain generally disconnected to date.

    Learning from Singapore and India could help the UK move towards a more consistent approach. That might involve:

    • developing a national framework for AI in higher education that sets clear expectations around ethics and inclusion;
    • funding staff training and digital literacy programmes inspired by Singapore’s emphasis on lifelong learning;
    • supporting multilingual and accessible AI tools that mirror India’s focus on linguistic and regional diversity;
    • building evaluation mechanisms to understand how AI adoption affects equality of opportunity.

    In the end, the challenge is less about technology, and more about governance. The UK has the capacity to lead in responsible AI education if policy connects local innovation to a national vision grounded in fairness and public trust.

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  • HEDx Podcast: Applied learning at Singapore Institute of Technology – Episode 160

    HEDx Podcast: Applied learning at Singapore Institute of Technology – Episode 160

    Dr May Lim Sok Mui is an Associate Professor and the Assistant Provost of Applied Learning at the Singapore Institute of Technology.

    She has pioneered a coaching approach to competency-based education at the Institute, from its new campus in Punggol.

    In this episode, Dr May Lim explains what best practice looks like when teaching skills-based students who need to be lifelong learners.

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  • What legacy does Yale-NUS College leave in Singapore?

    What legacy does Yale-NUS College leave in Singapore?

    When Wee Yang Soh was considering his degree options, he felt his choices were limited. The Singaporean had been offered a place to study chemistry at the National University of Singapore (NUS), but he was wary of accepting.

    In his experience, school had felt like he was simply being “trained” to pass exams. “I didn’t want my university education to be like that,” he said. Soh liked the idea of liberal arts education but couldn’t afford the hefty tuition fees charged by the U.S. colleges offering those programs.

    So when, in 2011, NUS announced it would be opening a liberal arts college—the first of its kind in Singapore—in partnership with Yale University, Soh jumped at the chance to apply. He was part of the inaugural cohort of students enrolled at the college, graduating in 2017.

    Four years later, NUS suddenly declared that it would no longer be continuing the partnership, with plans to close the college once all existing students had graduated.

    While Yale-NUS College is not the only international partnership in Singapore that has come to an abrupt halt—having helped develop Singapore University of Technology and Design’s curriculum, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was shown the door in 2017—it is among the most talked about. This unexpected announcement drew just as much attention, if not more, as the opening of the college had, with rumors swirling about the reasons for the decision.

    Today, as the college enters its final semester before shutting its doors for good, can liberal arts live on in Singapore? And are international partnerships off the table in a country increasingly embroiled in debates about national identity?

    Singapore’s government first began discussing the prospect of a liberal arts college in 2008. Policymakers saw the establishment of one as having multiple benefits—reducing the number of local students going abroad, diversifying pathways within the country’s higher education system and contributing to Singapore’s ambition to become an international education hub.

    So when Yale-NUS College opened in 2013, it seemed like the perfect fit. Unfortunately, this synergy didn’t last.

    “The context changed,” said Jason Tan, associate professor at Nanyang Technological University’s National Institute of Education. “For one thing, there’s no longer any official talk about establishing Singapore as an international education hub.”

    Although Singapore launched the Global Schoolhouse Project in 2002, an initiative that aimed to recruit 150,000 international students by 2015, by the mid-2010s, the numbers remained far below targets and talk of the scheme quieted as public debates around immigration heated up.

    Writing in the academic journal Daedalus in 2024, Pericles Lewis, the founding president of the college, suggested that things had gone a step further: “Singapore has not been immune to the forces of populism and nationalism that have affected most parts of the world,” he wrote.

    For a college in which international students represented about 40 percent of the student population, this was a problem.

    Throughout the college’s life, the governing party “showed itself to be highly sensitive to complaints about benefits reaped by foreigners, and to concerns of middle-class Singaporeans about the accessibility of higher education,” Lewis wrote.

    The institution also became central to debates about academic freedom in Singapore, with the last-minute cancellation of a course focused on protest generating backlash. To some, the college was a site of rare political activism and freedom in Singapore, which was both welcomed and feared, depending on your point of view.

    However, Linda Lim, professor emerita at the University of Michigan, argued that the college had little impact on the state of academic freedom in Singapore more widely.

    “From the beginning it was understood and even explicitly acknowledged that Yale-NUS College would practice and experience academic freedom only within the college walls and premises,” she said.

    “Yale may have flattered itself, or argued to mollify dubious faculty in New Haven, that Yale-NUS College would help advance academic freedom in Singapore—a naïve and neo-colonialist attitude.”

    Moreover, Soh believed claims of heightened student activism at the college were exaggerated, with intense media attention fueling public ire towards the institution.

    “From the first year, the Singaporean public and the government were already pretty afraid that politically motivated actions on campus would pose a problem for Singapore,” he said. “And they kept a very close eye on the college activities, to the point where it felt like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

    At times, small incidents on campus, such as disagreements over new course curricula, made national news, he said. This “reinforced the idea that the students were political or dangerous and all of that stuff, when, really, everything that happened in college felt, at least to me, incredibly mundane and incredibly small and silly.”

    NUS College, a U.S.-style undergraduate honors college for NUS students, was established in 2022 in place of Yale-NUS College. While this new institution offers a residential experience, small class sizes and some shared curricula, it is a far cry from a traditional liberal arts college.

    Today in Singapore, “there’s more focus on interdisciplinary learning,” said Tan. “Across all of our universities, in one form or another, there’s this concern about future economic needs.

    “The future problems will require all those buzzwords—critical thinkers and flexible, adaptable people and people who possess this interdisciplinary pool of knowledge and so on.

    “That trend has pretty much superseded the excitement over having a liberal arts education for our undergrads.”

    For Lim, the closure of Yale-NUS College was a “cautionary tale” for international higher education institutions “who think they can be a beacon of light in authoritarian countries by collaborating with autocratic governments.”

    The college’s chief legacy, she continued, “is the quality of the students it educated and graduated.”

    Soh is currently undertaking a Ph.D. in the U.S. and credited the college and his professors for inspiring him to do so.

    “I hope to teach in the future as a professor,” he said. “I want my students to be able to treat education as not a stepping-stone to grades or to credentials, but as a way to reformulate how we think about and relate to this crazy world that we live in today.

    “I think the legacy lives on in me, but I can’t say that it lives on in Singapore or in NUS for sure. But I hope it does.”

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