With ongoing globalization, the role of higher education in developing excellent human resources who can play an active role in international society, among other things is becoming increasingly important. Recently, the international competition among higher education institutions to recruit the best and brightest students has been heating up increasingly. In this section, we present the outline of recent trend of internationalization in higher education with reference to policy of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) .

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This article examines the contemporary tasks of Japanese higher education, especially focusing on the engineering education. The author points out the significant role of international cooperation in engineering education to the national development of partner countries. At the same time, the collaboration should be transformed into more horizontal one, under the rapid change of global environment. The author also argues the importance of the commitment of younger generation for establishing a sustainable long term relationship between Japan and other countries

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Nowadays, human resource development through international cooperation is high demand in the field of engineering higher education in developing countries. This is firstly due to the important asset for sustainable development of countries and secondly due to the rapid progress of science and technology in the world. Two JICA projects are explained as a case study. The paper summarizes present situation and future issues under JICA activities in engineering higher education.

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The Korean government is setting up an ambitious policy for an engineering innovation program called “engineering education innovation program.” Its primary goal is to resolve quantitative and qualitative imbalance problems in industrial manpower of the country. It is also a policy that aims at progressively reforming engineering education in Korea in cooperation with the Ministries of Education (MOE) and Commerce, Industry and Energy (MOCIE) . The development of specialized centers for engineering education programs by engineering schools, in particular, can help the government provide suitable supports for enhancing industrial competitiveness.

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The University of Tokushima has signed International Cooperation Graduate School education program provided the Double Degree with 10 Universities in 5 Countries which are Harbin Institute of Technology, Tongii University, Xidian Jiaotong University, Dalian University of Technology and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in China, University of Auckland (New Zealand) , Kyungpook National University and Korea Maritime University (Korea) , Florida Atlantic University (U.S.A.) and Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse (France) . In the International Cooperation Graduate School, the students could systematically take the Major and Minor curriculums and are able to study the subjects of the field other than their major fields. In this program, we dispatch and accept the students to/from the overseas universities. We educate the engineers that create the highly and interdisciplinary scientific skill, challenge to the new field of research boldly and are active with a good communication skill on the global stage. We intend also to enhance the internationalization and communization for the education of the graduate school′s level by dispatching/accepting the academic staffs mutually.

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Academic cooperation and double degree (DD) program between the Intergroupe of Ecoles Centrale and Doshisha University are introduced. Starting as the first DD program between Japan and France in 1998, this education program has produced more than 20 Japanese and French double degree students of master level. It has then been modified as new DD programs including PhD and undergraduate students. The new DD program for undergraduates includes two years study program as a regular student in the partner university, which can produce more advanced engineers with international points of view. Our DD PhD program, which is very challenging new program, is expected to bring dynamic scientific cooperation between universities.

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This article describes that Toyohashi University of Technology (TUT) has been receiving international students from all of the world increasingly every year since 1990 and the increase in the international students can be attributed to vigorous international cooperation activities by TUT. International Cooperation Center for Engineering Education (ICCEED) is playing a central role of international cooperation in TUT and two projects implemented by ICCEED in 2007 are introduced.

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Recently, Japan announces the government policy which increases the number of foreign students studying in Japan from one hundred thousand at the present time to three hundred thousand until 2025. In order to realize the policy, there are many problems to be solved. One resolution is the twinning program with good performance for the living and educational cost and high quality higher education.

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The University of Tokushima Graduate School of Advanced Technology and Science has launched the International Affiliated Double-Degree Program. In this program students pursue double degrees in engineering at the graduate level organized between the Graduate School and one of its 11 overseas partner institutions. Since the Graduate School is committed to offering content lectures in English, the faculty members involved need a good command of English. Future outgoing students also have to improve their English (and the local language spoken at the partner institution) to conduct academic activities at the partner institution successfully. This paper describes the author′s continuing efforts toward the provision and improvement of English language support for engineering students and instructors, touching on similar activities elsewhere.

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English education for specific purpose (ESP) , particularly for the field of natural sciences and technologies, has been attracting great interests in Japan because of the growing demands of the ability to use English in working place to the graduates in the filed. In Gunma University, we have launched a new style of ESP program tilted as “Collaboration between Academic and Industrial Sectors for Practical English Education” as a part of Good Practice Program supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, Japan (MEXT) since 2006. The program aims to steam up the ability of students to use English through a variety of activities including the presentation of scientific topics in English in a regular class work and the pseudo-conversation (role-playing) style training in a non-regular class work.

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The encounter with foreign nationals in everyday life calls for not only understanding of the other on the level of recognition but also the ability to cope with the whole spectrum of emotional reactions associated with direct experience of other cultures. Viewing the subject from the perspective of cross-cultural psychology, this paper outlines the course of human information processing that restricts cross-cultural personal acceptance and the psychological process involved in contact with other cultures. Building on this basis, it then discusses the significance of understanding other cultures and examines requirements for communication with people who have different cultural backgrounds. A particular focus is the approach to communication with international students in Japanese universities.

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One of the educational goals of the Advanced Engineering Faculty of Suzuka National College of Technology is to instill in graduates the ability required to become an internationally engaged engineers. To help realize this goal a project oriented toward the development of an international internship or an international cooperative education (Co-op) system was planned and implemented for the past three years. In this paper the results of investigations concerning the present state of Co-op in the United States and Canada, a tentative international internship at a factory in the United States, and an educational program developed in cooperation with Georgian College in Canada are described. In cooperation with the Ohio State University, a newly developed distance interactive-learning system that enables us to simulate international internships is also proposed.

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The work integrated learning (WIL) is quite essential for students of engineer education to solve the various problems in manufacturing products. The term of the Japanese internship for students is too short to bridge the gap of “School to Work” . As the cooperative education (CE) systems, like the German “Dual-systems” , in western countries are very different from the internship in Japan, there are many kinds of difficulties to be overcome before adopting them. Miyagi National College of Technology (MNCT) has innovated in a new program to establish CE systems regularly in Japan. This time, two teams, made up from not only the institution but also administrations and companies, were delegated for benchmarking after European WACE (World Association for CE) countries, i.e. UK, Sweden, Finland, and Germany. The concept of the Engineer Training Center (ETC, or “TORESEN” ) , that will be offered thorough CE in order to bring up students to “expert engineers” , was proposed. This has another major scheme that is a grassroots program to produce “good teachers” as a faculty development (FD) program.

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Center for Engineering Education Development, CEED, Hokkaido University was established to provide new graduate course programs more practical and concordant with the needs of industry and global society. The major program is the overseas internship, where students join some project as experiment, design, analysis, production, software making, etc, in the companies or research organizations in the foreign countries. For these three years, CEED sent over 65 students to 24 countries in the world. In this report, the CEED implementation of the internship program is described and examples of students′ activities in the overseas internship are introduced. The educational effect is also stated based on the questionnaire survey. From the data, students′ abilities such as, international understanding, challenging spirit, attitude to learn new things, as well as language proficiency are markedly improved.

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This paper describes Toshiba′s training program in Information Technology in India. It is not a simple technology training, but a training for globalization of Japanese engineers so that they can cope with people from different culture and business practices. We first describe why such training program became necessary. We then describe how the training courses and contents are developed. The operation of the training program and our effort in continual improvement are explained. The effectiveness of the program is also evaluated. The training program presented is a first in its kind and we believe that it can contribute to changing Toshiba from inside toward more globalized corporation. We also believe that this kind of overseas training is effective in training young students so that they can cope with globalizing society after graduation.

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International collaborative project of engineering design education traces back to the time when two visiting academic staff from Singapore Polytechnic (SP) came to Kanazawa Institute of Technology (KIT) for four months in 2002 to study engineering design education. An international collaborative project to commercialize a new healthy product, which was developed by SP students of School of Chemical and Life Sciences, started in 2006. KIT organized a Yumekobo project and SP offered Product and Process Research and Development Program in order to promote the joint project. Students of both institutions conducted market analyses and package designs of the new product which was developed by other SP students. In this paper, the international collaborative project is discussed in details.

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A project work in which learners of a foreign language engage in a task with the native speakers is one of the effective ways to bring in ample real communication opportunities to a classroom. This scheme also gives both parties meaningful experiences for intercultural understanding. This paper reports a “Pythagoras” machine production project in which international students were paired up with Japanese students as a part of a Japanese for science and technology course in a summer intensive program. Based on the participants′ course evaluation data, the paper also discusses the effectiveness of the project for Japanese language learning and for promoting intercultural understanding.

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It becomes more important for the teachers to give the Japanese education which is appropriate for the students′ courses and need. The students who are going abroad at the engineering department need this kind of Japanese education as well. In order to achieve it, it is the useful way to compile the utterance data in the lectures of engineering, and to extract keywords used frequently. From this inspection, we found that new words and technical words which the students saw for the first time were not so many in the lectures. We consider that we can have the solution for the problem that the students have the difficulty to listen to the lecture. This short paper is the start to solve the problem.

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