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What is a MOOC ?
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are free online courses that anybody can take, and those who complete the course can earn an official certificate for a fee. Top universities around the world offer MOOCs, and the total number of registered learners on the Coursera and edX platforms has reached more than 130 million. Along with self improvement, learners are using MOOCs to improve their professional skills, and the individually validated certificates are helping learners advance in the workplace and make career changes.
Featured Courses
Four Facets of Contemporary Japanese Architecture: City
This is the third course in the “Four Facets of Contemporary Japanese Architecture” series, which focuses on the third facet: city. After the 1970s, Japanese architects are said to have stopped conceptualizing cities and instead focused on designing the individual buildings that make up the cities. However, as cities continue to undergo significant transformations in response to globalization, the advent of information technologies, and so on, Japanese architects are once again engaging the city, and doing so in unique ways. This course on “City” will review the works of those architects who have attempted to conceptualize cities through their architecture and examine the changes over the last half century as well as the issues for the future. Fumihiko Maki, Itsuko Hasegawa, Riken Yamamoto, Kengo Kuma, Jun Aoki, and Atelier Bow-Wow (Yoshiharu Tsukamoto & Momoyo Kaijima) visit their buildings to discuss the ideas behind their respective works.
Learn How to Teach by 6 Min. Micro Teaching
How should we work on class design and improvement? This is a program to learn specifically how to design and improve classes through the creation of a 6-minute microteaching class. The program is designed for current and prospective teachers from elementary to higher education, and can be completed in three weeks. The program is designed to help learners understand the significance of the “6-minute microteaching class,” and practice the necessary knowledge and theory based on the “ADDIE Model,” a concept for creating such classes, through a variety of work (hands-on experience). Then, through creating a graphic class design and a class design sheet, learners design and conduct a microteaching class. Afterwards, learners will review the microteaching class and work on improvement. In addition to watching videos and completing worksheets (individual work), the course also emphasizes the expansion and deepening of learning through interaction with other learners in the learning community, such as discussion forums.
Words Spun Out of Images: Visual and Literary Culture in Nineteenth Century Japan
In their ambition to capture “real life,” Japanese painters, poets, novelists and photographers of the nineteenth century collaborated in ways seldom explored by their European contemporaries. This course offers learners the chance to encounter and appreciate behavior, moral standards and some of the material conditions surrounding Japanese artists in the nineteenth century, in order to renew our assumptions about what artistic “realism” is and what it meant. Learners will walk away with a clear understanding of how society and the individual were conceived of and represented in early modern Japan. Unlike contemporary western art forms, which acknowledge their common debt as “sister arts” but remain divided by genre and discourse, Japanese visual and literary culture tended to combine, producing literary texts inspired by visual images, and visual images which would then be inscribed with poems and prose. Noticing and being able to interpret this indivisibility of visual/literary cultures is essential in understanding the social and psychological values embedded within the beauty of Japanese art.
Interactive Computer Graphics
Computer graphics can be a powerful tool for supporting visual problem solving, and interactivity plays a central role in harnessing the users' creativity. This course will introduce various interactive tools developed in computer graphics research field with their design rationales and algorithms. Examples include enhancements to graphical user interfaces, authoring tools for 2D drawings and 3D animations, and interactive computer-aided design systems. Rich live demonstrations and course assignments will give you insights and skills to design and implement such tools for your own problems.
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