Civil engineers need to cooperate with many project of collaborators such as: engineers, operators, technicians, local residents, the general public, government authorities and many others to meet the huge challenges posed when undertaking mega projects. Internationally, there is a broad understanding of the engineering skills, technology and methodologies used to develop and construct large scale projects, though Japanese junior colleagues often find it difficult to establish themselves when joining a multinational team. In this paper, we adopt the Text-Mining techniques to analyze reports provided after overseas training (organized by our University) to determine impacts on students’ thought processes and ways of thinking. Through such exposure, it could be anticipated that all students should cultivate their communication abilities, cultural and religious knowledge and other interpersonal skills associated with the domestic country visited and those of the participating team members. From the results we can conclude that overseas training offers significant benefits and exposure to students in understanding cultural differences and establishing them on the road to developing international careers.

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The lack of sufficient budget and scalability has been considered the main obstacles for digitalizing global education for engineering students. We faced the same problems during the process of improving our e-learning system SNOWBALLS. In this paper, we showcase an economic and efficient solution based on open-source e-learning platform Moodle and Microsoft Azure cloud computing technology. Compared to traditional e-learning solutions, our proposal ensures the security, reliability and accessibility of the SNOWBALLS e-learning system and it helps the educational institution reduce implementation cost. We present in detail the three steps of implementing the proposed solution: install and configure servers on the cloud, install and configure Moodle platform on the servers, and migrate contents from the previous SNOWBALLS system to the new system. We believe that the proposed solution will benefit other educational institutions that have similar needs, as well as benefiting students with ubiquitous, flexible and reliable e-learning experiences.

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The recent shifts in the circumstances of engineering education are generally attributed to the internationalization of the whole society. The authors have been conducting various international cooperative activities on the engineering education to develop the programs for university students. The major purpose of the activities is to announce the results of engineering educational reforms we have conducted so far in the international conferences in order to gather the information and to discuss about its exchanges. We have performed 58 presentations in the international conferences for the last ten years, and investigated the international educational issues which were investigated in each university. Since the current major issues on the engineering education are common to every country and society, it is well effective to discuss the topics on the educational programs and to exchange information about them. The information exchanges with foreign faculties and researchers in the worldwide conferences enable us to gaze at the targets to internationalize our educational programs and activities on the engineering education.

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In 1996, when the Faculty of Engineering of Niigata University, Niigata Japan first set up its international student exchange program with Otto-von-Guericke-University, in Magdeburg, Germany, few students showed an interest in studying abroad. Twenty years later, the students’ attitudes have changed. The number of students who express a desire to study abroad and have experienced the international conference has increased markedly. In this article, two directions of opportunities for students to start studying abroad are presented; one is short-term summer school program as a subject of general education to remove the students’ barriers to go abroad, and the other is research-oriented students’ exchange program.

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The promotion of international communication and collaboration through English at Japanese Universities is one of the most important tasks in order to develop a global environment. Although exchange programs can provide students with the advantages of largescale communication, the use of technologies for long-distance interaction such as Skype, has made easier and more practical the language and cultural exchange with students located around the world. In this paper, a class promoting international communication through Skype is explained along with the testimony of participants and their impressions on the benefits and scope of this program. Documentation of the motivation of students to take this class is also reported and compared with their later impressions of the program and the lessons learned. Recommendations for improvement for future years are also provided.

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M-Skype is an online collaboration with MIT and the University of Tokyo, where the students talk on an internet telephone and teach each other their language and culture. The program was started in 2009 and more than 140 students on our side have studied English and American culture in this program since then. COIL is a Collaborative Online International Learning in which American Center for Education is involved and trying to connect American universities to the universities in the overseas countries, especially in Japan. To make M-Skype one of the COIL programs, the author attended the leadership academy of COIL which was held in Washington D.C. in April, 2017. Many universities in the US expect to have some international partners to do some collaborative works, however, many obstacles lie in the way. How to remove those obstacles and have an effective learning outcome were discussed in the academy.

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This paper describes our new global PBL (gPBL) and discusses its evaluation. We constructed a 6-week project-based-learning class entitled “Design and Implementation of Virtual Space” and conducted it twice a year from 2006. Based on that class, we performed interactive remote teaching trials using a shared virtual space between two universities two times in 2008 and 2010. After these trials, we improved the curriculum by employing tactile information into the virtual space in addition to the existing visual and auditory information. We added a workshop on the tactile device to the class and expanded the interactive remote teaching trials in two directions: sharing tactile information in a common virtual space (hardware) and generalizing the development platform (software). We experimentally confirmed our system between the Shibaura Institute of Technology (SIT) in Japan and the Thai-Nichi Institute of Technology (TNI) in Thailand. Based on this background, we began a new gPBL with a tactile device and HTML5 at TNI between SIT and TNI.

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Tokyo City University Australia Program (TAP) is a part of the Globalization Program and is a collaborative education program developed by Tokyo City University and Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia. Tokyo City University Australia Program aims to produce global leaders with practical, specialist skills, building on TCU’s long history of hands-on technical education. The achievement of the program for students will be that they may learn, think and talk in English. TAP is composed of preparatory education in Japan during the student’s first year (TAP in Japan) and the five months study abroad program during their second year (TAP in Australia). TAP students take English lessons and global citizen coaching during the preparatory education period and four Liberal Arts subjects in addition to improving English subjects during study abroad period. There are various sub programs to accelerate interaction with native Australian students and international students from many countries. The program educates global citizens with the flexibility, vision and communication skills to deal with changing needs.

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In the modern corporate management, the importance of logistics fields is highly estimated, and it is necessary to discuss an international alliance of logistics education. The education of logistics engineering for university students is not easy for its specialty; the students cannot understand quickly just only with the systematic lectures, and thus PBL, or the Problem-based Learning has been recently considered as an effective solution. In addition, as for the international alliance, students among several countries should use English as their communication tool. In order to understand whole concept of logistics engineering among diverse students from different countries, English is useful as the common language to discussions in the class. Such background considered, this study suggests the outline of the syllabus of logistics engineering for international alliance.

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Effective oral presentation skills are becoming increasingly important for engineers and scientists, but in Japan, traditionally messages are often conveyed implicitly and listeners are expected to be responsible to understand the content. When presenting to audiences with various cultural and linguistic backgrounds, speakers should be responsible for conveying messages to help the audiences to understand the content effectively. Therefore, making conscious efforts to change the listener-responsible style to speaker-responsible style is very important for Japanese students to be successful presenters in a global society. A new approach to presentation, called the Assertion-Evidence approach, can be a powerful tool to guide speakers convey message effectively while helping audience comprehend and retain the content. In this paper, we explain what the AE approach is and how the use of this approach help Japanese students deliver effective presentations. This approach is characterized by three main features: building talks on messages not topics, supporting those messages with visual evidence, and delivering the talk by forming sentences on the spot (but after practice).

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International educational programs are becoming more global in these days. Joint degree programs initiated by world universities are gaining importance and are being implemented around the world. A recent study report found that about a third of all international undergraduate students in England transferred from program delivered offshore. Another Canadian survey notes that a number of institutions offering programs in collaboration with international partners have nearly doubled since 2006. SIT is also interested to uncover why joint degree (JD) programmes and dual degree (DD) programmes maintain an increasing trend in the world frontier. In the first year, we had tried to look at a survey in order to assess how world universities are performing in JD/DD programmes, its major challenges and try to comprehend regarding implementation methodologies for degree systems into SIT graduate school program. In this program, we considered their world ranking, location of the university, and their field of interest. Further, we also visited specific institutions in USA and Asia and met with specific experts in this field to implement DD/JD program at SIT and more details are presented.

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Elastic and plastic properties of various materials, generally measured by dedicated testing machines, constitute an important area of engineering education. It is therefore desirable that students understand this topic, not only numerically, but also experientially. Classic research has shown that the ratio of Young’s modulus and yield strength relates to so called springback phenomena in long and thin objects. This topic is the basis for the development of a kit for classroom activities, including different metal wires and bending templates, a card and two arbores. Students bend wires by hand, using the templates, and use individual moments applied to the wires to investigate springback. In this paper, the result of a collaboration involving experimental equipment design, engineering educators and software developers is described. It outlines the theoretical background, experimental procedure and equipment needed as well as how to compare lab results to data in visual Ashby charts for increased understanding.

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The hybrid indoor positioning algorithm using the pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) and fingerprint is proposed to solve the degradation problem of the positioning accuracy due to some environmental factors in multi-story building under Wi-Fi environment in this paper. The multi-wall-and-floor (MWF) model is used for the inter-floored positioning at a multi-story building in Wi-Fi environment. By the results, it can be seen that the performance of the proposed hybrid indoor positioning algorithm is superior than the dead-reckoning and the fingerprint schemes. Therefore, the proposed algorithm might contribute to achieve more highly qualified performance than other two schemes in indoor environment. This works was done with three graduated students by funding the Korea Research Foundation (KRF) as part of the capstone design project.

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