Recently, the globalization of society, complex economic structure, global competency and rapid development of technology urge us drastic modification of education styles so that young generation can adapt such complex and rapid changes and survive. The ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in Japan proposed Fundamental Competencies for working persons consisting of 3 competencies and 12 competency factors as the survival skill in the 21st century. Global adaptation is also inevitable for young engineers graduate from National Institutes of Technology (NIT) in Japan. National Institutes of Technology are well-known to be the institutes producing leading engineers with high skills and have a long term experience of PBL (Project/Problem based learning) education systems. NIT Sendai College has also been offering the spiral shaped education program with lectures followed by PBL type practices. On the other hand, efficient usage of ICT expands the possibility of various learning styles for students. While we maintain the old good tradition in our education system, we have to yet keep improving our system constantly to adapt the global change and making the best use of the latest ICT may provide us a feasible solution for it. Our college has proposed a new learning system called A-cube (Advance, Active and Autonomous) learning system. This system consists of Project/Problem based learning, Active learning and My-pace learning and is expected to stimulate students for active and autonomous learning and at the same time aims for reducing teachers’ load of running classes. It is quite sure that students are strongly required to have certain ability of critical thinking, versatile adaptation, basic competency and knowledge to survive a new age. In order to meet such various requirements, we offer the A-cube learning system which flexibly matches to the background knowledge, interest and situation of each individual student. The preliminary educational program plays an important and key role for implementing the new learning system and developing it successfully. It is very important for us to foster students the positive attitude toward learning in an early stage of the curriculum. We have to nurture student’s intention and motivation, and create good learning atmosphere in a classroom. We designed a new program for the first year students to nurture such intention toward learning. The program is separated in three parts and each part is designed to build up the foundation of active learning manner among students. We focused to bring out three major abilities of students in this program. The first one is the ability of expressing and explaining own thought, the second is the ability of settling arguments in a group discussion and leading to a proper conclusion and the third is the ability of communicating, contributing and collaborating in a group work. In this paper, we introduce the detailed content of this program and then summarize our first trail based on the feedback from students and teachers. The analysis of feedback from the students and teachers is reported and discuss further improvement based on the result.
Proceedings of the 12th International CDIO Conference, Turku, Finland, June 12-16 2016