34th Annual Scientific Conference

Dr Adrian W. J. Kuah is the Founding Director of the Futures Office at the National University of Singapore.

Before his current position, he worked in various jobs in the public service, the private sector, and academia. His stints in the civil service include the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Centre for Strategic Futures (in the Prime Minister’s Office).

His professional interests include public policy (especially education policy), complexity science, and futures thinking.

Session Synopsis:

Life, The University, And Everything in It: Trends in (and out of) Higher Education

The talk will cover some of the emerging trends in higher education, which are inextricably connected to developments in the broader socio-cultural and political context.

A central theme that will be addressed is the economic imperative underpinning Singapore’s education philosophy and policy. While dismissing economic considerations from the education policy calculus is naive, pragmatism must be balanced by other factors. To what extent, if at all, should higher education reclaim its project of formation (of the person) from the technocracy of pre-employment training?

Professor Callum Durward has been the Dean of the Faculty of Dentistry, University of Puthisastra, Cambodia for the past nine years. He has degrees from New Zealand, Australia and the United States and has worked across a wide array of settings including refugee camps, hospitals, school dental services and universities. He is a part-time specialist in Paediatric Dentistry at the Roomchang Dental Hospital in Phnom Penh. He is a former Council Member of South East Asia Association for Dental Education (SEAADE) and is the country representative for the Association for Dental Education, Asia Pacific. His research interests include dental public health, oral cancer, early childhood caries, and paediatric dentistry.

Session Synopsis:

Integrating Special Care Dentistry in Southeast Asia

The ‘Building Special Care Dentistry Capacity in Southeast Asia’ project started in 2021 by creating undergraduate resources for dental schools. At SEAADE 2022, a report on the project’s progress was presented to the Dean's meeting. The meeting stated a consensus for an update on the workshop at the next annual conference.

This year, the workshop will involve a collaboration with the International Association for Disability and Oral Health (IADH) to further discuss the development of Special Care Dentistry (SCD) training for undergraduate students in Southeast Asia. This workshop aims to integrate key elements of the current project with those undertaken by IADH. The collaboration seeks to enhance the capacity of SCD in the region.

The content of the workshop includes:

Discussion on the updates of the SCD Capacity project.
Presentation of the IADH undergraduate curriculum guideline.
Identification of potential approaches on how the IADH guideline may be mapped out into the existing or a new curriculum.
Brainstorming on potential ways for universities across Southeast Asia to work together, via an SCD alliance, to support capacity building and resource sharing to achieve the learning objectives.

The workshop consists of sharing sessions by representatives from various Southeast Asian countries on the best practices and recommendations for designing an SCD undergraduate training programme which is feasible culturally and economically. Examples of how the IADH guideline is applied to the curriculum design and content will also be presented, along with recommended teaching methodologies and assessment methods. References to existing successful programmes conducted by universities around Southeast Asia will be shared to provide ideas for other institutions to adopt and implement. There will also be a discussion on how facilities and services for special care patients can be funded.

Professor Gustavo Molina (BDS, DDS, PhD, FiADH) graduated from the Faculty of Dentistry, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. He has written two PhD theses related to Special Care Dentistry; the first was defended in 1998 at the National University of Córdoba, Argentina; the other, was defended in 2014 at Radboud Nijmegen University, Netherlands. He is a former Professor in Dental Materials and Special Care Dentistry at the School of Dentistry, Universidad Católica de Córdoba. He also served as a Clinical Practitioner in Cariology at The Faculty of Dentistry, University of Hong Kong. He is currently President of the International Association for Disability and Oral Health (iADH).

Session Synopsis:

Integrating Special Care Dentistry in Southeast Asia

The ‘Building Special Care Dentistry Capacity in Southeast Asia’ project started in 2021 by creating undergraduate resources for dental schools. At SEAADE 2022, a report on the project’s progress was presented to the Dean's meeting. The meeting stated a consensus for an update on the workshop at the next annual conference.

This year, the workshop will involve a collaboration with the International Association for Disability and Oral Health (IADH) to further discuss the development of Special Care Dentistry (SCD) training for undergraduate students in Southeast Asia. This workshop aims to integrate key elements of the current project with those undertaken by IADH. The collaboration seeks to enhance the capacity of SCD in the region.

The content of the workshop includes:

Discussion on the updates of the SCD Capacity project.
Presentation of the IADH undergraduate curriculum guideline.
Identification of potential approaches on how the IADH guideline may be mapped out into the existing or a new curriculum.
Brainstorming on potential ways for universities across Southeast Asia to work together, via an SCD alliance, to support capacity building and resource sharing to achieve the learning objectives.

The workshop consists of sharing sessions by representatives from various Southeast Asian countries on the best practices and recommendations for designing an SCD undergraduate training programme which is feasible culturally and economically. Examples of how the IADH guideline is applied to the curriculum design and content will also be presented, along with recommended teaching methodologies and assessment methods. References to existing successful programmes conducted by universities around Southeast Asia will be shared to provide ideas for other institutions to adopt and implement. There will also be a discussion on how facilities and services for special care patients can be funded.

Associate Professor Mas Suryalis Ahmad graduated with a Bachelor of Dental Surgery from the University of Malaya, Malaysia in 2006, as well as Doctor of Clinical Dentistry and Doctor of Philosophy in Special Needs Dentistry from the University of Melbourne, Australia in 2016. She recently obtained a Master of Medical Education (with Distinction) from the University of Malaya. She also acquired her Membership from the Royal Australasian College of Dental Surgeons (in Special Needs Dentistry specialist practice), the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow and the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Currently, Assoc Prof Mas is the President of the Malaysian Dental Association and the Deputy Dean (Student Affairs) at the Faculty of Dentistry, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. She is also an Adjunct Professor at Universitas Airlangga, Indonesia and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Puthisastra, Cambodia. She sits as a member of the International Association for Disability and Oral Health’s Education Committee, the Royal Australasian College of Dental Surgeons’ International Committee and Malaysian Qualification Agency’s Specialist Dental Education Committee (Leader for Special Care Dentistry) and the Malaysian Dental Council’s Dental Specialty Sub-Committee (Special Care Dentistry).

Session Synopsis:

Integrating Special Care Dentistry in Southeast Asia

The ‘Building Special Care Dentistry Capacity in Southeast Asia’ project started in 2021 by creating undergraduate resources for dental schools. At SEAADE 2022, a report on the project’s progress was presented to the Dean's meeting. The meeting stated a consensus for an update on the workshop at the next annual conference.

This year, the workshop will involve a collaboration with the International Association for Disability and Oral Health (IADH) to further discuss the development of Special Care Dentistry (SCD) training for undergraduate students in Southeast Asia. This workshop aims to integrate key elements of the current project with those undertaken by IADH. The collaboration seeks to enhance the capacity of SCD in the region.

The content of the workshop includes:

Discussion on the updates of the SCD Capacity project.
Presentation of the IADH undergraduate curriculum guideline.
Identification of potential approaches on how the IADH guideline may be mapped out into the existing or a new curriculum.
Brainstorming on potential ways for universities across Southeast Asia to work together, via an SCD alliance, to support capacity building and resource sharing to achieve the learning objectives.

The workshop consists of sharing sessions by representatives from various Southeast Asian countries on the best practices and recommendations for designing an SCD undergraduate training programme which is feasible culturally and economically. Examples of how the IADH guideline is applied to the curriculum design and content will also be presented, along with recommended teaching methodologies and assessment methods. References to existing successful programmes conducted by universities around Southeast Asia will be shared to provide ideas for other institutions to adopt and implement. There will also be a discussion on how facilities and services for special care patients can be funded.

Dr Dujeepa D. Samarasekera is the Senior Director at the Centre for Medical Education (CenMED), Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, and Senior Consultant at the Ministry of Health (MOH), Singapore. Dr Samarasekera has been involved in curriculum development, quality assurance and accreditation, and faculty development at both undergraduate and postgraduate level health professional courses. He was the inaugural President of the College of Clinician Educators at the Academy of Medicine Singapore. Dr Samarasekera is the Editor-in-Chief of The Asia Pacific Scholar journal and serves on the editorial advisory boards of several health and medical education journals. He serves in many international medical education organisations. He has published widely in peer-reviewed medical education journals as well as authored books and book chapters relating to medical and health professional education.

Session Synopsis:

Entrustable Professional Activities (EPA): Unravelling and Exploring its Potential in Dental Education

Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) have emerged as a capable educational framework in healthcare professional training, including dental education. EPAs are specific tasks or responsibilities that can be entrusted to learners once they have demonstrated sufficient competence. They provide a holistic approach to developing and evaluating students’ or trainees’ professional abilities, moving beyond traditional training models.

In dental education, EPAs offer several potential benefits:

EPAs outline specific tasks and responsibilities that dental students must achieve, providing clear learning outcomes for educators and learners alike. This clarity enhances curriculum design and prepares students for real-world dental practice.
Integration of clinical, communication, and critical thinking skills allows students to learn to apply their knowledge effectively in realistic patient care scenarios, leading to better clinical outcomes and patient experiences. Some EPAs involve teamwork and collaboration with other healthcare professionals, fostering essential interprofessional communication and coordination skills.
EPAs are designed with increasing levels of complexity, allowing students to progress through different stages of their education. As students master an EPA, they can move on to more advanced activities, promoting a sense of achievement and motivation. EPAs focus on tasks resembling realistic clinical scenarios, bridging the gap between classroom learning and practical application. This contextual learning enhances students' ability to adapt to the challenges of actual dental practice.
The EPA framework supports ongoing assessment and feedback, allowing educators to monitor students' progress and identify areas for improvement. Regular evaluations help students build their confidence and competence over time. EPAs offer a standardised and objective method for evaluating students' readiness for dental practice, ensuring that all graduates meet the expected standards.

However, incorporating EPAs into dental education also presents some challenges, such as the burden of increased assessment and possible increased resources for successful deployment.

The session will focus on these areas and the emerging evidence supporting the above conceptual statements.

Dr Mark Gan is an Associate Director and Academic Developer of the Centre for Development of Teaching & Learning at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He has been involved in a wide variety of initiatives and programmes to enhance the professional development of staff within faculties, schools and beyond, including the development of a teaching portfolio for growth and promotion purposes, the advancement of the Teaching Assistant Programme, and setting up the Learning Communities and the Affiliates Programme on Educational Leadership. He has also organised discussion sessions and encouraged colleagues to participate and share ideas on issues such as assessment literacy and feedback practices. His research interests lie in feedback and assessment, reflective practice and the impact of academic development work on teaching and learning approaches.

Dr Gan has a PhD in Education from the University of Auckland, where he was supervised by Professor John Hattie and Associate Professor Mary Hill.

Session Synopsis:

Student Engagement in Clinical Training through Effective Feedback

Students learn in various ways, but to improve, they need to receive and make use of timely, specific, and informative feedback. More importantly, for feedback to be effective, it must make sense to students, be actionable and can be used in subsequent or future work. However, teachers face several challenges when formulating or providing student feedback, such as the lack of time and the inability to address individual needs.

Our session is designed to help teachers rethink the design and purpose of feedback, and build on nested formative assessment cycles to better provide feedback opportunities so students can be active participants in the feedback process.

This hands-on workshop will provide participants with:

An overview of the role of feedback in dental education.
Common pitfalls in providing feedback during clinical supervision.
Insights on ways to engage students in effective feedback during clinical supervision.
Development of a roadmap to create feedback opportunities during clinical supervision.

Professor Muneer Gohar Babar is an Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at International Medical University's (IMU) School of Dentistry and a Professor of Dental Public Health. In 2008, he began working as a Senior Lecturer at IMU. Since the early 2000s, He has worked in education and research. Prof Muneer is involved in planning, evaluating, and assessing the undergraduate dental curricula. He has been a fellow of the IMU Centre of Education (ICE) since 2010, and in 2015, he was named IMU’s eLearning Guru. He is the Secondary Proposer for COST | European Cooperation in Science and Technology. Empathy and dental home visits are his primary research interests, and he has published in peer-reviewed journals and written book chapters on the subject. He has several peer-reviewed papers published in high-impact journals. He is also an Associate Certified Coach.

Session Synopsis:

Embracing the Reality of Artificial Intelligence in Dental Education and Research

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming integral to various industries, including healthcare. In the dental field, AI has the potential to revolutionise education and research. This session aims to explore the practical implementation of AI in the realms of dental education and research. As Dentistry evolves, embracing AI becomes crucial to unlock its transformative potential in advancing dental practice, education, and scientific discovery.

Some key topics that will be covered during the session include:

What is AI?
How has the AI landscape evolved?
How will the emerging AI landscape impact dental education and research?
AI-powered learning platforms.
Integrating AI into dental simulation training.
AI-driven research in Dentistry.
Ethical considerations in AI application.
Future directions and opportunities for collaborations.

The session aims to inspire dental educators and researchers to embrace AI as a powerful tool for revolutionising dental education and research. Attendees will gain practical knowledge and actionable insights to effectively leverage AI technologies, leading to optimised dental training and ground-breaking scientific advancements.

As the Senior Manager for the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Institute for Applied Learning Sciences and Educational Technology (ALSET), Mr Hartman leads a team working to identify how learners and educators can benefit from the university’s educational research, data, and technologies; develop tools and infrastructure to make those benefits possible; facilitate localisation and adoption of solutions; and measure their impacts. In line with these four aims, the ALSET Data Lake ecosystem collects data and computing resources for the campus community to test and evaluate educational innovations.

For the past three years, Mr Hartman has also contributed to the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine’s Educational Data Analytics team, where he offers his expertise in educational data system design and educational data analysis.

Session Synopsis:

Swimming in a Flood of Educational Data: A Practical Guide for Using Institutional Teaching and Learning Analytics in Dental Education

Twelve years after establishing a formal definition for Learning Analytics (LA), the practical use of educational analytics to improve teaching and learning in dental education remains a work in progress at many universities. The lag can be ascribed to a host of reasons which can be succinctly distilled into the common refrain among LA researchers: “One size doesn’t fit all.”

From individual learning activities designed to develop a diversity of intended outcomes, to courses curated to meet different objectives, to programmes assembled to serve different missions, a standardised implementation of educational analytics still seems far away. However, building on the findings and theories from the learning sciences, there are generalisable principles for identifying learning needs, developing productive solutions to those needs, and ensuring their efficacy.

In this session, we will begin by explaining and contrasting the different types of educational analytics and call attention to the temporal spans and affordances they offer when tailoring analytics solutions to the fits often found in dental education.

During the panel discussion, we will highlight the application of institution, teacher, and learner-level data which are used to shape monitoring systems, course designs, and learning activity interactions in dental education programmes.

Associate Professor Intekhab Islam graduated from the University of North Bengal, India with a Bachelor of Dental Surgery in 2001. He was awarded the NUS Research Scholarship to pursue a postgraduate degree in Restorative Dentistry and obtained his Master of Science in Restorative Dentistry in 2005. He went on to pursue postgraduate training in Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (OMS) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and graduated in 2008. He obtained a Fellowship from the Academy of Medicine Singapore in 2011 and was admitted into the Specialist Register in OMS in the same year. He went on to complete his PhD in Bone Tissue Engineering from NUS in 2017.

Assoc Prof Islam pursued a subspecialty training in Temporomandibular Joint Reconstruction and Replacement as a National Council for Postgraduate Dental Education scholar at Nine Wells Hospital Dundee, Scotland under the Academic Medicine Development Award, which was jointly awarded by the National University Health System and Ministry of Health, Singapore.

Assoc Prof Islam is currently a faculty member in the Discipline of OMS at the NUS Faculty of Dentistry and a Senior Consultant at the National University Centre for Oral Health Singapore.

Assoc Prof Islam received the NUS Annual Teaching Excellence Award in 2016. He has also been presented similar teaching awards during his tenure at NUS Dentistry. His research interests include using virtual and augmented reality for simulated surgical training and dental education.

Session Synopsis:

Student Engagement in Clinical Training through Effective Feedback

Students learn in various ways, but to improve, they need to receive and make use of timely, specific, and informative feedback. More importantly, for feedback to be effective, it must make sense to students, be actionable and can be used in subsequent or future work. However, teachers face several challenges when formulating or providing student feedback, such as the lack of time and the inability to address individual needs.

Our session is designed to help teachers rethink the design and purpose of feedback, and build on nested formative assessment cycles to better provide feedback opportunities so students can be active participants in the feedback process.

This hands-on workshop will provide participants with:

An overview of the role of feedback in dental education.
Common pitfalls in providing feedback during clinical supervision.
Insights on ways to engage students in effective feedback during clinical supervision.
Development of a roadmap to create feedback opportunities during clinical supervision.

Professor Michael Botelho is from the Division of Restorative Dental Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. He has been pursuing educational research for over 25 years. He is an Associate Editor of the European Journal of Dental Education and is currently the President of the Educational Research Group for the International Association for Dental Research. He has over 100 peer-reviewed research papers, with 20 of these in dental education. He has several education awards, including the prestigious University Distinguished Teaching Award and the Hong Kong UGC Teaching Award. He has lectured, consulted, and examined across Southeast Asia, Japan, Europe, and the United States in dental education. He is also the creator of Communities of Practice in the Association of Dental Educators of Europe. He has helped support the creation of three groups – professionalism, staff and student wellbeing, and students as partners, of which he is a member of the steering group on the last two.

Session Synopsis:

Developing Communities of Practice (CoPs) for SEAADE – Designing, Implementing and Sustaining CoPs

Communities of Practice (CoPs) bring together individuals with a common vision and passion for specific areas of interest. These CoPs facilitate a rich exchange of ideas arising from the collective experiences and expertise of the group. In so doing, mental models are challenged, and new knowledge is generated. In the context of dental education, changes abound, and new ways of teaching and learning are emerging that can benefit from CoPs and how we can learn from shared goals. The set-up of CoPs among dental educators will bring the art and science of dental education to greater heights amidst the evolving educational landscape.

At the end of the session, participants will:

Deepen their appreciation of Communities of Practice – their intent, their benefits, and their limitations.

Gain insights on how to design, implement, and sustain CoPs for successful outcomes.

Discussion of possible CoPs to advance dental education across SEAADE will be explored. This will include their rationale and benefit for these CoPs, potential challenges in convening these, and how members will be selected to steer the group.