A Proposal for the Global and Collaborative PBL Learning Environment Where All Global Members on Different Campuses Are "On the Same Page" throughout the Process of Learning in the Project

Abstract

This paper purports to share with the higher education community the global PBL active learning curriculum and the learning environment, which have been collaboratively developed with the universities in Taiwan and Kansai University (KU). The collaborated universities developed an optimal curriculum to enhance and nurture students' "Future Work Skills 2020" defined by the Institute for the Future, such future human skills as Sense Making, Social Intelligence, Novel & Adaptive Thinking, Cross-Cultural Competencies, Computational Thinking, New Media Literacy, Transdisciplinarity, Design Mindset, Cognitive Load Management, and Virtual Collaboration. The curriculum fully employs PBL strategies in global teams, where teams for PBL are organized with students with heterogeneous cultural backgrounds in the virtual learning environment. The basic concept of such curriculum is based on COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning), originally developed by State University of New York. COIL makes full usage of IT to generate virtual learning environment for students worldwide. In order to go beyond the COIL concept incorporating the future skills defined by IFTF, the allied universities employed PBL in global AGILE teams to deepen insights from various cultural viewpoints in terms of consensus building through team discussions. Due to the spatial and temporal differences, enrolled students conducted their team learning activities in the virtual learning environment asynchronously, making use of IT technologies and cloud services in order to be on "the same page" in the progress of the project throughout the course. Further, the assessment strategies to enhance students' efficacy is the key factor in the course, which is also discussed with examples. This paper reports the global PBL active learning curriculum and environment collaboratively developed with the universities in Taiwan and Kansai University.