Designing a class to teach multi-viewpoints

The Graduate School of System Design and Management of Keio University (Keio SDM) was established on April 1, 2008 to cultivate system thinkers who can lead the development and operation of large-scale complex technological and social systems. One of the indispensable capabilities of system thinker is multi-viewpoints. One of our approaches to cultivate persons who have multi-viewpoints through a class at KEIO SDM is to make good use of combination of self work and group work. Our students come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Group works with different background can cultivate multi-viewpoints as far as the students work together seriously. The student motivation is also very important for this approach. We designed the class, introduction to systems engineering, which is mandatory for all master degree students to realize the approach. We design the class to realize the multi-viewpoints. As the results of our system design of the class, we implemented the e-learning video for the class preparation and self and group consecutive work. As we mentioned above, a student motivation is also very important to make group work effective. Our approach to make student motivated is to make students feel their growth through the class. Our method to realize this approach is to ask the same question both at the beginning of class and at the end of class. This makes them participate actively in the group work by motivated. We did the questionnaires to the student at the end of each semester. According to that, the implementation of the class design works well. The combination of self work and group work makes the students feel the lesson easy. And the same question before and after lesson makes the students feel the lesson understandable and well ordered. However, there are two concerns. One concern is the time for the preparation. The students have to spend more time to prepare by watching e-learning to learn the knowledge of systems engineering. Because of this negative effect, even if the class feels more understandable, ordered well and easy to understand, the total evaluation does NOT become better. The other concern is the motivation. The same question before the lesson and after the lesson was implemented to make the students feel their growth and finally motivated. But the results of the questionnaire don't support this expectation.