Recently, much attention has been given to MOOCs – massive open online courses, in which large numbers of people are able to learn online free of charge. A number of such courses have already been conducted by the University of Tokyo, including “Conditions of War and Peace” (taught by Prof. Kiichi Fujiwara in 2014) and “Four Facets of Contemporary Japanese Architecture” (taught by Prof. Kengo Kuma and Assoc. Prof. Yusuke Obuchi in 2016). (A full list of past courses can be found here.)

The III has played a key role in the University of Tokyo MOOC program, especially in the areas of production and management. On this occasion, we asked Prof. Yuhei Yamauchi, Assist. Prof. Yuri Isshiki and Assist. Prof. Yu Ara to talk about the present and future of MOOCs at the University of Tokyo.

The University of Tokyo and MOOCs

The Center for Research and Development of Higher Education laid plans and conducted external negotiations for the University of Tokyo MOOC program, while the Interfaculty Initiative in Information took charge of the actual course production and management.

The University of Tokyo has distributed courses mainly through two MOOC providers: Cousera and edX. Use of these platforms offers a major advantage to the University of Tokyo’s global outreach efforts, thanks to their very large number of registered users (21,000,000 and 7,250,000 respectively)

The combined total of users registered to date for courses offered through the two providers by the University of Tokyo is 326,068, and the number of those who have completed courses is 15,572. According to Prof. Yamauchi, part of the appeal of MOOCs is their huge scale: “The total number of students at the University of Tokyo is approximately 28,000, of whom about 3,000 are international students. In other words, the number of people taking MOOCs is about ten times greater than the number of students, and the number of people completing MOOCs is roughly five times greater than the number of international students. Furthermore, people from almost every country (more than 180 countries) in the world are taking MOOCs provided by the University of Tokyo. The size of this learning environment is unprecedented.”

“Visualizing Postwar Tokyo”

In 2014, a course called “Visualizing Postwar Tokyo” taught by Prof. Shunya Yoshimi of the III was distributed through edX. This course was organized jointly by the University of Tokyo, Harvard University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, making it the first online course conducted cooperatively by multiple universities. 13,000 people from 137 countries registered for it, and questionnaire results indicate a very high level of user satisfaction.

In response to the question “Did your view of Japan change as a result of taking the course?” one person replied as follows: “I learned a lot, especially about Japanese culture and Tokyo from the postwar period to the present. Previously I had not appreciated the social complexity of Japanese society, and I was grateful for the perspective from Japan..” The III was clearly able to provide a course appealing to learners around the world with little existing knowledge about Japan.

The Future of MOOCs

Since 2013, the University of Tokyo has produced a large number of MOOCs, including “Visualizing Postwar Tokyo.” The task now is examine ways to utilize the contents accumulated so far. There is a growing realization that simply providing online videos of lectures is not necessarily sufficient.

One of the ways in which the III seeks to address this is through the development of so-called “flipped learning.” This is a new style of learning that combines elements of online learning with face-to-face learning. The next article will describe how “flipped learning” has been designed and implemented at the III.

The article was written by Hideaki Matsuyama (Assistant Professor).
Material for this article was gathered by Pan Mengfei (PhD student), Miho Okada (Secretary to the Dean of the III), and Hideaki Matsuyama.