The Center for the Promotion of Excellence in Higher Education at Kyoto University hosts the International Symposium “Envisioning Blended Next-Generation Higher Education: Asian Top Universities’ Cutting-edge ICT-enhanced Teaching and Learning” on March 2, 2018.

Five years have passed since the global proliferation of MOOCs started, and there are already over 10,000 MOOCs around the world now. At the same time, Flipped Learning and Blended Learning, utilizing MOOCs, SPOCs, OpenCourseWare and other online educational resources and environments, has become increasingly popular, and this promotes the development of new systems for obtaining credit hours, academic degrees, and professional certificates.

In Japan, as in many other countries, the promotion of lifelong learning and recurrent education, driven by the rapid changes in both global and local industries and labor markets, is becoming an urgent and critical issue. However, the challenge remains for the people in their jobs to go back to a college or graduate school as full-time on-campus students. Furthermore, as the youth population continues to decline, the strategic use of ICT to support more personalized learning for all becomes increasingly vital for a sustainable society.

In this symposium, the blended next-generation higher education will be explored by learning from the exemplary pioneer efforts in innovate ICT-enhanced learning and teaching at some of the top Asian universities as well as the visions and thoughts from their senior administrators and leaders.

• Co-sponsor: Institute for Information Management and Communication, Kyoto University