Media Room

The COVID-19 pandemic situation may have brought about a halt in physical travel for overseas programmes but it did not deter our School of Business Management students from participating in virtual immersion programmes from the comfort of their homes.

25 SBM students participated in an overseas immersion programme through e-learning via zoom with the students from Osaka International University from 22 to 26 March 2021. Over the 5 days, SBM students learnt basic Japanese language, music and food culture from the OIU students. OIU staff shared the history and business climate of Japan with the SBM students.

OIU also arranged for an English Rakugo (stand-up comedy) for our students which they truly enjoyed! In return, SBM students shared with the OIU students Singapore Slangs as well as our hawker food culture. Our SBM colleagues also shared with the OIU students Singapore’s transformation from Third World to First World, and delivered a Design Thinking Workshop for them.

In addition to the structured lessons, both SBM and OIU students also conducted virtual tours of each other’s campuses and places of interests via zoom. These virtual tours definitely enticed the students to want to visit Singapore and Osaka once overseas travel resumes.

Dawn Lim from Diploma in Business Management says: “I benefited greatly from interacting with the Japanese students and learning about their food, culture and architecture. There was a slight challenge in communicating with the Japanese students as some of them were only equipped with basic English and I also struggled with the Japanese Speaking workshop because some of the terms were hard to pronounce. But the Japanese teacher was very patient and assisted us along the way. I also befriended a Japanese girl and hopefully I can remain in contact with her in future so that if I were to go over to Japan, she can be my personal tour guide and vice versa if she comes to Singapore.”