On Sunday, February 22, 2015, Soka University held the FD Forum in Celebration of Selection for the Acceleration Program for University Education Rebuilding (AP) at Room AE452 in Global Square on campus. About 100 students and internal and external representatives and students participated.

In the morning, President Yoshihisa Baba gave an opening address, and Professor Shinji Fukushima from the Enrollment Management Department of Yamagata University delivered the keynote lecture “Visualization and Verbalization through Active Teaching and Learning and IR: Practical Examples of EMIR to Learn about Students.” IR stands for institutional research intended to support universities in improvements of operations and decision-making.

In the lecture, Professor Fukushima presented Yamagata University’s management activities to help students create value and maximize it, along with the unique Comprehensive Student Information and Data Analysis System for EMIR. He told the audience that it helped in “creating an organizational culture that bases decision-making on data, and enables the cycle of educational reform management that centers on students’ satisfaction and sense of achievement.”

In the afternoon, Professor Kayo Matsushita from the Center for the Promotion of Excellence in Higher Education at Kyoto University delivered the lecture “Skills Required of Students and How to Evaluate the Skills.” During the lecture, Professor Matsushita mentioned that methods for evaluating students’ learning outcomes are increasingly diversifying, then introduced the idea of “performance evaluation” for directly assessing how much students have learned by examining their presentations and pieces of work (i.e. performance). Then she presented practical examples of different types of rubrics as the standards for gradual and multifaceted assessment of the quality of performance, and emphasized the importance of designing rubrics in ways that the assessment in itself serves as a learning experience for students.

Keiji Kawashima, Head of the Department for Higher Education Research at the National Institute for Educational Policy Research, gave the lecture “Active Learning to Offer and Challenges for FD.” In the lecture, Mr. Kawashima mentioned that a report by the Central Council for Education focuses on “learning hours” as the starting point for urging students to explore independent learning. Then he told the audience that one of the objectives of active learning is to plan and conduct classes that encourage students to have more learning hours.

Professor Kazuhiko Sekita, Head of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) at Soka University, provided the overview of Soka’s efforts for AP. He told the audience that a high-quality active learning course should “motivate students to learn the goals of the course, and consequently, they will study more than one hour outside of class to adequately understand what they learn in class.” Then he talked about faculty training and quantitative goals to promote the active learning courses. Mr. Kawashima made a closing comment to wrap up the FD forum.