Technological Cooperative Education Programs for Postgraduates and Undergraduates in Colleges of the Social Science and the Science and Engineering

抄録

We developed "Technological Co-op Seminar (technological work integrated learning,)" for postgraduates and under-graduates in colleges of the social science and the science and engineering at Ritsumeikan University (RU) in 2010. In this practicum, the combined teams with postgraduates and undergraduates in colleges of the social science and the science and engineering were given the technological projects which had developed by some companies. The teams have to solve some technological problem in six month. The practicum is designed to enable the postgraduates to take up leadership roles in project management and contribute to their area of specialization. Taxonomy is widely used to identify an educational target. Taxonomy can be viewed in three areas "cognitive domain", "affective domain", and "psychomotor domain". We conducted a three-dimensional evaluation process of postgraduates and undergraduates who had completed the entire Technological Co-op Seminar course as follow: (1) Self-evaluation by students. (2) Mutual evaluation in student teams. (3) Objective evaluation by an academic advisor. We drew up twelve common evaluation indicators that apply to all the three-dimensional evaluation processes. These twelve indicators are categorized in the application of academic knowledge, the team activities, the ability to discover and solve issues and their values. As a clue to analyze the active status of team activities, we added a leadership category that consists of team operation, team management, and attention to member indicators. We then used these fifteen evaluation indicators for this study. In essence, RU's technological cooperative education programs for postgraduates and undergraduates in colleges of the social science and the science and engineering should be classified as "educational programs that reaffirm both the enjoyment and significance of university education."