An interim report of a four-year joint global engineer

The Kanazawa Institute of Technology (KIT), Japan, and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (RHIT), USA, started international educational and research exchange activities in 1992. Since then, they have actively engaged in faculty and student exchange programs. However, these are basically short-term, at most, one-year programs. In order to expand the international exchange activities further, the two institutions organized the “KIT-RHIT Joint Committee” in 2010. The committee members discussed the objectives and agreed that they should aim for developing a new scheme to foster global engineers together over a longer period of time. The new program, “Joint Global Engineer Education Program” was launched in 2011. It is a four-year undergraduate program, and upon completion, a certificate of a second major is to be given. Both KIT and RHIT student participants attend special joint lectures and participate in joint project work in addition to required language courses and special subject courses at their own institutions. The joint lectures by the guest speakers who themselves have global work experiences are delivered through a web conference system and held about once every three months. The joint projects are composed of two types: Type A and Type B. Type A is a video-conference project in which students of both institutions stay in their own institution, form one joint team, and work together by communicating through a web conference system. Type B is a face-to-face project held during the 2nd and 3rd years of the program. What is unique about this program is that students are able to understand what the necessary skills and competence for globally-active engineers are through the lectures while developing such skills and competence for themselves through interaction with the project partner students using both English and Japanese. The authors had an interim assessment of the students' performance and progress in learning objectives of the Joint Global Engineer Program. Initial findings reveal that the Global Engineer Education Program is effective in fostering global engineers.