Digitalisation of Global Education: Japanese Experiences and Implications

This research aims to identify the characteristics of recent Japanese global education experiences using digital technologies. Until the late 2000s, universities in Japan mainly focused on enhancing language skills in their study abroad programs. However, recently changes demonstrate that there is now a greater emphasis to foster cross-cultural awareness. Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) is a pedagogy to teaching and learning which provides faculty and students the ability to communicate in different countries. Several universities in Japan use this format to engage in dialogue especially focusing on institutions in the United States. In addition, Japanese universities have been attempting to adopt assessment systems in order to evaluate the effectiveness of their global education programs, which are more diverse in contents and lengths compared to traditional study abroad programs. For example, the Belief, Events, and Values Inventory (BEVI) is one of the tools introduced in Japan that can measure how one sees self, different culture, and the world. As an attempt to capture the specific features of recent global education policies, programing and evaluation in Japanese higher education institutes, this research focuses on a case study of a private university located in Tokyo, and presents preliminary findings from the COIL courses and the BEVI dataset obtained from undergraduate students that have attended study abroad programs in 2018. The analysis is informed by the university’s relevant policy documents published since the 2000s, as well as newspapers, periodicals, and journals mainly from Japan. The presentation ends with further thoughts on the use of evaluation tools to measure the impact of global education programs.