2021 Volume 8 Pages 31-41
In the humanities and social sciences, there is not much budget allocated for the operation of “seminars”, which are small groups. Nonetheless, seminars at large universities have a large number of students, so the cost of conducting seminar activities that mainly involve fieldwork, such as city planning, becomes a major burden. The expenses mentioned here are mainly travel expenses. Actually confronting local issues and working to solve them leads to deep learning for the students, and for the local community, seeing the activities of students through the university leads to vitality.
In this study, we decided to implement an advanced approach of acquiring external funds in small groups of universities. Specifically, we tried to secure expenses through crowdfunding (hereinafter referred to as “CF”) by utilizing the sharing economy mechanism and focusing on seminars in the humanities and social sciences with a focus on urban development, and aimed to understand the significance and issues involved.
As a feature of the operation in this study, the seminar students themselves updated the new information on the project page and disseminated information using SNS, and conducted activities to call out to prospective supporters. An overview of the implementation of the CF is summarized, and analysis and discussion are provided based on the daily PV numbers and the amount of support. In addition, we conducted a questionnaire survey of the seminar students who were the main implementers of the CF, and grouped and statistically analyzed the data obtained.
In the 38 days of the CF project, we received 1,309,000 yen from 96 supporters. In addition, the CF led to introspection, including metacognition, of each seminar student. Through this project, we found out that it is possible to secure funds for seminar activities through CF mainly for humanities and social sciences seminars. We also found out that this initiative can have an educational effect.
