The goal of this paper is to share the experience of developing brush-up online interactive programs enhanced with the concept of MOOC, for incoming freshmen, six months before the start of the academic life. Three programs were developed with three-tiered courses for Basic Math, English for Communication, and Writing Skills, with cooperation of members consisting of undergraduate students, office staff, and teaching staff in a team, making use of the project-based learning model. While developing the courses, the team identified and defined problems and worked on solving the problems with limited resources on campus. The target readers for this paper are school administrators, IT administrators, and any other stakeholders on campus with the intention of improving the quality of education on campus. Especially, this paper shows a model of active learning across stakeholders beyond the borders of the classroom. It is a must reading for active learning advocates in the social constructive education model. It is an understood practice that the MOOC education has been solely instructionally designed and developed by professionals including commercial vendors. However, Kansai University developed the learning contents, the instructional and learning model with the interactive aspects, as well as the delivery system from scratch. It is based on the innovative idea generation with careful learning design incorporating the concepts of knowledge mapping, "gamification", social learning, and "one-sit learning and mastery". The goal setting, the concept making and design, the knowledge mapping as well as the fundamental educational philosophy were defined and developed by the team.
This paper aims at the dissemination of a new course design, which reports and shares our experience of designing a new course to meet the new needs in the society. The higher education has been focusing on developing students’ logical thinking or reasoning skills through debate, believing that such skills would make the students succeed in the society after graduation. However, from the view point of resilience in the society after a natural disaster, which usually demolishes the fundamental infrastructure as well as human bonding through trust, the communication with empathy to build trust seems to play a more important role than the skill to debate. Is there any way to incorporate such advanced communication skill with empathy in the higher education responding to the current needs from the society before the students become members of the society? Kansai University has developed a new experimental course for advanced communication with empathy to be implemented in the general education enhanced with ICT. This paper reports Kansai University’s successful problem-solving process and endeavor in the curriculum development for the communication with empathy.
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