HarvardX Faculty Director to speak on MOOCs at Center for the Promotion of Excellence in Higher Education event

Professor Robert A Lue, Faculty Director of HarvardX and of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University, will speak at an event on Monday 19 January highlighting new frontiers in education.
Pedagogical applications of the internet, multimedia, and other technologies have the potential to revolutionize and significantly advance university-level teaching and learning, especially in terms of issues of pressing concern to Japan's higher education. These include the internationalization of human resource and education systems, the expansion of re-learning opportunities for adults in response to the needs of industry, the assurance and improvement of the quality of university education, the dissemination of educational information, and the emergence of innovative new teaching methods.
Interest is growing at universities domestically and abroad in synergistically combining the latest educational platforms and tools -- most notably massive open online courses (MOOCs) and open courseware (OCW) -- with traditional teaching and learning techniques, as well as systematically visualizing, analyzing, and evaluating teaching and learning activities, and applying these practices to encourage active and productive learning.
In light of the fact that most Japanese universities have yet to establish comprehensive systems for supporting such efforts, lacking sufficient development capacity, the University's Center for the Promotion of Excellence in Higher Education has invited Professor Lue to deliver a keynote speech and discuss his institution's pioneering initiatives and their outcomes at an international symposium. This open seminar will also present an overview of the status of educational reform and faculty development efforts at Japanese universities, leading to discussions on exploring strategies for sparking innovation and improvements in education based on individual students' passion for teaching and learning.