NEWS
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
Contemporary Garden City Concept from Asia
The course focuses on contemporary urban planning issues, particularly the Garden City concept, addressing the global trend of integrating green spaces into cities to combat environmental challenges. Cities worldwide are striving to introduce green elements regardless of location, driven by concerns such as climate change, natural disasters, and political instability. The course discusses the transition from traditional urban structures to dispersed green matrices, emphasizing the importance of green spaces in enhancing their resilience. It contrasts Western cities' vertical agricultural integration with historical Japanese cities' horizontal integration, advocating for a new approach to urban agriculture. Let's consider the concept of a contemporary Garden City, focusing on the symbiotic relationship between urban and rural land uses. Through a mixture of theoretical discussion and practical examples, this course explores strategies for realizing this urban planning vision. The course is offered in Japanese and English and is available at all times. Anyone can take the course from the Coursera website.
Sustainability Science - A Key Concept for Future Design
Sustainability is indispensable for the future of humankind. Sustainability science has emerged as an effort to tackle the complex problems the world is facing today. Lecturers from different disciplines provide a holistic overview of key issues in sustainability including industrial pollution, an aging society, human-nature connection, urban planning, resilience, environmental governance, and education for sustainable development. In this course, you will learn about historical and current sustainability issues that have emerged around the world, as well as some of the approaches that have been used to solve them. You will be exposed to industrial and water pollution control issues, in addition to challenges caused by an aging and shrinking population. You will also learn about the human-nature connection and initiatives that aim to create sustainable societies in harmony with nature, based on the concept of Socio-Ecological Production Landscapes and Seascapes (SEPLS). You will explore how ecosystem-based disaster risk reduction (Eco-DRR) approaches can be used to reestablish the human-nature connection through re-naturalization of damaged environments. This course will also consider an urban planning point of view by exploring the value of an urban-rural land use mixture to create new sustainable societies and resilient megacities. Finally, you will learn about environmental governance, a crucial element for progress towards a sustainable future. You will be introduced to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) as a learning method for sustainable development and discuss international debates on ESD. Japanese perspectives are emphasized throughout the course in the hopes of providing concrete value to solving contemporary sustainability issues.
Visualizing Postwar Tokyo, Part 1
Tokyo emerged out of the ruins of war to become a large city of 10 million people in only a quarter of a century. During this process of change, the capital of a military empire that once invaded East Asia experienced occupation by the U.S. armed forces, hosted the Olympic Games, and transformed into a consumer hub where young people could enjoy economic “wealth.” It is important to know that this process was recorded in countless photographs, documentary films, TV programs, and so on. We will retrieve many of these archived pictures and videos and analyze what happened in postwar Tokyo from different perspectives. In Part 1, you will look at the changes that occurred in postwar Tokyo over a quarter of a century from four different perspectives: 1) occupation and Americanism; 2) imperial gaze and royal wedding; 3) The Olympic city; and 4) economic-cultural clash in Shinjuku. This examination of urban history will provide you with the insights necessary when considering changes in other large cities in Asia, such as Seoul, Beijing, and Bangkok, at the end of the twentieth century.
Visualizing Postwar Tokyo, Part 2
The history of postwar Tokyo reveals an essential feature of the modern city, i.e. the city as a place of visualities. In postwar Tokyo, countless gazes fell upon others; gazes from and upon Americans and the Emperor, gazes going up skyscrapers or rushing aggressively through the cityscape, and gazes twining and wriggling among classes, genders, and ethnic groups in downtown Tokyo. In Part 2, we will focus on the geopolitics of these gazes in modern Tokyo. What kinds of gazes fell upon the war orphans, the poor, and the marginalized groups in Tokyo? How did students themselves, who represented the vast accumulation of knowledge in Tokyo, perform in front of these gazes? Moreover, how did cinema or television shows, as media for these gazes, implicate the whole city? In answering these questions, we will identify the geopolitics historically involved in the practice of “visualizing postwar Tokyo.”
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