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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

edX

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.”

YOSHIMI Shunya (Professor, Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, The University of Tokyo)

Coursera

From the Big Bang to Dark Energy

We have learned a lot recently about how the Universe evolved in 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang. More than 80% of matter in the Universe is mysterious Dark Matter, which made stars and galaxies to form. The newly discovered Higgs-boson became frozen into the Universe a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang and brought order to the Universe. Yet we still do not know how ordinary matter (atoms) survived against total annihilation by Anti-Matter. The expansion of the Universe started acceleration about 7 billion years ago and the Universe is being ripped apart. The culprit is Dark Energy, a mysterious energy multiplying in vacuum. I will present evidence behind these startling discoveries and discuss what we may learn in the near future.

MURAYAMA Hitoshi (Professor, Kavli IPMU, The University of Tokyo)

edX

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.

MINO Takashi (Project Professor, TOKYO COLLEGE, The University of Tokyo) TAKEUCHI Kazuhiko (Project Professor, Institute for Future Initiatives, The University of Tokyo) YOKOHARI Makoto (Professor, Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo) HORITA Masahide (Professor, Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo) and 7 member(s).

Coursera

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.

Robert CAMPBELL (Emeritus Professor)

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