A long-continuing international research internship has been conducted between Japanese and German universities for more than 10 years. The purpose is to nurture the students performing the international research in the forefront of science by means of mutual stay abroad. The Japanese students have been individually sent to the foreign institutes for three to five months. Foreign students were accepted to Japanese institutes in the same manner. The students had to manage their own research activities and daily works by themselves in unfamiliar circumstances. The foreign collaborators were selected from the institutes where the relevant studies were conducted for years. Since the information exchanges are indispensable in the international collaborations in natural science, the skills and knowledge the students would obtain are very important for the whole research network. The experience of individual stay abroad is surely benefit for the students’ activity on job hunting. The number of mutual stay-abroad has reached 42. As well, the number of paper publications reached 18 up to now from 2012.

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The Global Scientist and Engineers Program (GSEP) is Tokyo Institute of Technology’s purely English instruction-based undergraduate program in transdisciplinary science and engineering specifically designed for international students with minimal to no Japanese communication ability. The program faces multiple challenges not just those relating to multiculturalism but also in providing education in a newly emerging academic field. This research evaluates the program through questionnaires, mind mapping workshop, and focus group discussion conducted with the program’s first cohort who graduated in March 2020. The program was evaluated on how well the graduating students have gained confidence in important areas relevant to their field of study and the amount of support they received while in the program. The first cohort showed satisfaction being graduates of the program, expressed confidence in their transdisciplinary knowledge, and see themselves as global citizens. With enhanced engagement with Japanese students, the program has the potential to become a top-notched international undergraduate engineering degree program based in Tokyo.

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This research was concerned with factors that affect group working skills in online and on-site activities. The objective of this research was to study the relationship between attitude toward working on the project, leadership, and environment of students who attended the cross-culture engineering project. A descriptive research design was used. A rating questionnaire was used as the research tool. The statistical tools used to analyze the data were mean, standard deviation, Pearson correlation coefficient, and the coefficients of the stepwise multiple regression equation. The activities were classified as online and hybrid. In the online group, it was found that leadership (β= 0.491) was associated with group work skill at a statistical significance of 0.05. For the hybrid group, leadership (β= 0.572) was at a statistical significance of 0.05 while environment (β= 0.321) was at a statistical significance of 0.01. The results from this study acknowledged the factors affecting the group working skill in online activity organizing in the education sector.

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Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have become an alternative learning platform in recent years and the number of learners has increased recently due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the majority of MOOCs are taught in English, some non-English MOOCs, e.g., those offered in Japanese, usually provide some content in English, such as subtitles, in order to attract more learners. With the aim of increasing the number of international learners from English-speaking countries, a time-efficient and low-cost process for video lecture dubbing into English was developed to circumvent the learners having to read subtitles. Automatic dubbing was done using Google Text-to-Speech (TTS) API for two different online engineering courses originally recorded with Japanese lectures. In this paper, the stepwise video dubbing process is described in detail to produce an automatically English dubbed lecture video from a video transcript. The algorithm to mitigate the problem of the audio-video synchronization is introduced. Preliminary results from the post-course survey on learners’ satisfaction towards the English automatically dubbed videos are also presented.

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Self-directed learning tasks take considerable cognitive effort in the beginning as students are required to make decisions that will have major effects on the rest of their experience. Recommender systems were created specifically for the purpose of aiding the decision-making process, and their use in educational contexts have been no exception. With self-directed learning in particular, students engage in both exploratory and evaluative forms of divergent and convergent thinking as they narrow down their choice of topics and tasks. The issues they encounter along the way relate to their achievement goals and sense of self identity. In this paper, we analyze student responses to questions inspired by achievement goal theory and identity status theory during an interview that took place at the conclusion of a self-directed learning project. Based on the results, we then review evaluation metrics for recommender systems and propose an approach for further research into recommender systems for self-directed learning.

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The Faculty of Engineering at Niigata University conducts the student exchange program called “G-DORM” in Engineering Education and the first author experienced two G-DORM programs. One is travel-type field group work (GW) program participants travel overseas and conduct field surveys with local students. The other is online international GW program participants conduct group discussions with foreigners without overseas travel. This study conducted an analysis to find the lessons and problems of the two programs that the first author had experienced. The results of the analysis indicated that online international GW could not be carried out instead of travel-type field GW. Also, from the results, this study proposed the effective utilization method of online international GW integrated with travel-type field GW.

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Under the circumstances of COVID-19, there was no choice but to have online global internships; however, it has gotten clear that the online global internship has more advantages than the face-to-face global internship in some perspectives. This paper attempts to clarify the characteristics of each face-to-face and online method through comparative analysis using the participant observation method on cases of two-week online and face-to-face internships in the manufacturing industry. Also, this paper proposes an inbound and outbound global internship that incorporates the merits of both face-to-face and online methods, which would be useful after COVID-19.

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Niigata University had conducted a lecture course with multicultural and multi-disciplinary team-based learning focusing on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Society 5.0; however, the lecture course became impossible to implement due to the outbreaking of COVID-19. Therefore, Niigata University developed a 3-day collaborative online international learning (COIL) program with the subject of “Sci-tech Challenges for SDGs in Post-COVID-19” based on the knowledge gained from past practices of the lecture course. This study argues the achievement of the 3-day COIL carried out by Niigata University with Royal University of Phnom Penh in 2020. The impact of the 3-day COIL for students was positive and was emerged as the increase of the knowledge on SDGs, the understanding of the necessity for improving English skills, or the increase of teamwork skills. Also, the 3-day COIL, highly evaluated by participants, resulted in the increase of many student’s motivation towards overseas. On the other hand, improving the tight schedule of the 3-day COIL was pointed out as a future challenge.

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This paper aims to present a new framework for international collaboration in engineering education using sustainable design projects with people of all ethnicities, which is centered by an advocate for holistic wellbeing of all life forms on our planet Earth, named Geosymbiosis/Chikyuu Kyosei. Each time different region in the world is chosen for its local problematic issues inhibiting our holistic wellbeing, and collaboration-based project proposals are made to execute together with those involved, as an attempt to solve them together. The reporting topics in the first half will focus on the description of this new frame work that brings opportunity for international collaboration named the Geosymbiotic /Chikyuu Kyosei Workshop, and how it is guided by the diagram with three significant pillars, and the design methodology. The latter half attempts to show in brief the assurance in quality by the fruitfulness of the evidenced outcomes seen in actual design projects that were conducted with cooperation among the people of different ethnicities under the framework of Geosymbiotic Workshops.

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The reliability of the structure of various products and the manufacturing process of their parts is evaluated using the results of solid mechanics. For this purpose, engineers use simulation software based on computational solid mechanics, and a collection of simplified formulas obtained by applying solid mechanics to simple conditions. Both methods require a thorough understanding of solid mechanics. However, it is not easy to understand phenomena in this field expressed by abstract mathematical models. Improvements in solid mechanics education have already been implemented for a long time including experiential understanding approaches. For the same purpose, this paper deals with two history topics: the mechanism of beam bending by Leonardo da Vinci and the destruction of columns during temporary installation by Galileo Galilei. Simple experiments were conducted to understand the bending of Leonardo da Vinci’s beam experientially.

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