Towards an Efficient Education at the University of Aizu

By Mohamed Hamada, Assistant Professor of Language Processing Systems Lab

The 21st century is the era of technology and telecommunication, this requires high qualified professional personnel. Thus education comes to play a central rule in this era.

Education in the 21st century should also make use of the new technologies. The University of Aizu (UA), as a leading university in Fukushima area and as an international standard university, focus on developing its education process. For this purpose the software department established a working group (members are: M Hamada (chairman), H. Kanda, S. Sedukhin, K. Otsuyama, J. Shin) to enhance a Friendly Lecture Program (FLP) within the university. The idea of Friendly Lecture Program is to merge the human power and new technologies in order to achieve the best method of teaching in lectures and to enable the students to gain knowledge in an efficient way. After several meetings and discussions among the FLP members, several proposals were introduced. Among these proposals were:

1. Organizing an annual (2-to-3 day) training course for ``advances in teaching methods" . To be organized by the university of Aizu in cooperation with other educational institutes and/or the ministry of education.
2. Declaring ``open door" lectures: each professor declares his lecture(s) as ``open door" lecture(s) for any one who is interested to attend the lecture.
3. Using interactive multimedia materials whenever possible, such as: video, audio, animated software, etc.
4. Creating a (unified) web site for each course including: syllabus, handouts, exercises, OHP slides, links to related materials and so on.
5. Introducing an elective course to train the students for external Information Technology test.