On Friday, October 29th, IIGE professors Dr. Sajjad Pouromid and Dr. Don Bysouth, and Coordinators Michele Fujii and Izumi Wada co-presented a case study of two Project-Based Learning (PBL) VE/COIL programs between Japan and the U.S. / Singapore at IVEC. Their presentation, titled "Incubating Mindset and Skillset through a PBL: Case Studies of Two Virtual Exchange Programs," outlined two short-term customized programs undertaken in February of 2021.

 

Fore more details, see the presentation abstract below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Due to COVID-19, growing numbers of employees are using various IT platforms to conduct business virtually, such as idea generation, and project collaboration. To thrive in the post-COVID 19, the future of jobs report (World Economic Forum, 2020) states that analytical thinking and innovation, active learning and learning strategies, and complex problem-solving are the top three essential skills. As educators, we need to nurture future leaders who can understand the impact of digitalization on business.

 

We fill this gap by practicing a virtual approach to project-based learning. We introduce two intensive programs aiming to cultivate the right mindsets and foster global competency and entrepreneurship for Japanese students at Kansai University. These programs aim to provide students with the knowledge, skills, and a set of tools to enhance their employability. For example, as the phenomenon of global and virtual collaborating has become a norm in the workplace, we designed a program with a new approach in which students experience and exercise fully online a whole cycle of entrepreneurial project execution, starting from problem identification to pitching the project outcome. Instead of providing a series of lectures, we emphasize direct hands-on practices of various IT platforms (e.g., Discord, Padlet, and Miro) to facilitate teamwork in different project phases.

 

We observed the impact of the new approach to raising students' awareness of intercultural diversity and willingness to explore new ideas. Students are the center of learning and teachers act as facilitators to help students apply just-learned skills and tools on problem-solving to simulate the actual business scenarios in a safe environment. Although with a steep learning curve, we observed students' digital competency has shown improvement. It can be said that these two virtual exchange programs are one of the emerging model cases of virtual exchange use of pedagogy.