Transnational Education with Kyushu University: Online Learning Platform and Dual Degree Program
Cultivating students' global thinking, enhancing international mobility and learning is one of the key projects of National Taiwan Normal University in promoting internationalization. With the powerful trend of globalization, 'transnational education' is booming among higher education institutions around the world. Although traditional student and teacher exchange abroad, distance teaching are still the mainstream of transnational education, under the influence of increasingly fierce competition in higher education, low birth rate, and the pandemic, transnational education is undergoing unprecedented changes and innovation.
National Taiwan Normal University and Kyushu University have been interacting in academic research and exchanges between teachers and students since 2015, and have achieved fruitful results. In 2018, the exchange was upgraded to university-level strategic partner as a sister-school relationship. Kyushu University is also the core sister school of the College of Education, College of Science, College of Technology and Engineering and College of Management. In recent years, the two universities have laid a good foundation for exchanges through mutual visits, holding cross-disciplinary higher education forums, administrative benchmarking, joint academic research projects, joint course, off-site teaching, student exchange, and Chinese learning training.
To further deepen the cooperation between the two universities in academics, the Office of International Affairs invited Distinguished Professor and Special Advisor to the President Masahiro Okamoto to the centennial celebration and to give a talk at the Collaborative Online International Learning forum. The forum was held on September 27 under the host of Vice President for International Affairs Liu Yi De. Professor Masahiro Okamoto was the key speaker and Prof. Yeh Meng Wan from the Dept. of Earth Science and Associate Prof. Mucahid Mustafa Bayrak from the Dept of Geography shared their experience on Collaborative Online International Learning.
In the future, NTNU will also launch the Global Virtual Classroom as one of the strategies for teaching innovation and improvement in the new phase of the higher education program. NTNU plans to open digital courses with a global virtual classroom that can be used between us and our sister schools. It will be beneficial to our goal as a bilingual university and the communication between universities.
Currently, in NTNU, there are more than 30 dual degree programs. About 180 students have attended these programs since 2008. With the work of our former Vice President of International Affairs, Liu Hsing Lin, the College of Science and College of Technology and Engineering have reached an agreement of a dual Master’s degree with the Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Engineering Sciences of Kyushu University. It is hoped that this dual degree program will foster international cooperation so that we can cultivate international STEM talents together and deepen the partnership between both sides.