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Oral communication skills are essential for engineers today and, as they are included in accreditation criteria of educational programmes, their teaching and evaluation deserve attention. However, concrete aspects as to what should be taught and evaluated in relation to oral communication skills have not been sufficiently established. In this paper, a method to aid the efficient teaching of oral presentation skills is proposed, from the presentation structure level to word and sentence level choices, through the use of JECPRESE, The Japanese-English Corpus of Presentations in Science and Engineering. As of June 2012, the corpus is composed of transcriptions of 74 presentations delivered in Japanese by students graduating from the Master's programme of various engineering departments and 31 presentations delivered in English, 16 by experienced researchers at an international conference on chemistry, and 15 by undergraduate engineering students of a mid-sized American university. The utterances were classified according to the specific moves (sections of the speech that express specific speaker intent) appearing in the presentations and frequently used words/expressions to express these moves were identified. (Contains 1 figure and 1 table.)

This paper explores Malaysian students' problems within their science and engineering tertiary courses in Japanese through their diary entries and semi-structured interviews. The study analyses how students implement management strategies to overcome their problems. Although many studies are available regarding students' academic activities in a foreign language, few of those have reported upon foreign students' academic experiences in Japanese science and engineering courses within their in-country program. The students predominantly had difficulties in writing experiment reports, understanding scientific concepts, and reading Chinese characters (kanji). Management strategies that they significantly employed to overcome their problems were peer cooperation and the use of internet resources. The paper discusses potential support that the program and the language course can provide for these students. (Contains 2 figures and 1 table.)

Background: Under the impact of globalization and the coming of the Information Age, there is a paradigm shift occurring in the engineering curriculum and academic structure. Apart from the creation of new programs for the emerging fields in engineering, the approach and orientation have also been shifted from objective-based/input-based education to outcome-based education. The criteria for the new generation of quality engineering graduates have been much broadened. Engineering program structures are being revised to facilitate student mobility, and set to meet global recruitment needs. Focus of discussion: This paper is divided into two parts: The first concerned with the general engineering education development and the second describes the developments in the European Union, the United States, and Japan. Suggestions: To meet the new learning outcomes, approaches to learning, teaching, and assessments are revised and realigned. Not only have the graduates to update their professional knowledge, they should also have acquired various generic thinking and communication skills, the ethical sense of social responsibility, learning how to learn and life-long learning, knowledge of foreign language and other culture as well as authentic experience in doing research. Conclusion: As engineering education is being internationalized, the government can keep in step with the international community by joining regional and international cooperation initiatives in engineering education. Students should be encouraged to participate in international research exchange programs. Institutions of higher learning must design new program structures, identify desired learning outcomes, determine ways to align and attain their outcomes through revising course content, provide pedagogical training for faculties, adopt a variety of teaching and learning methods, and devise appropriate assessment criteria and methods. (Contains 1 note.)

Ethics education for professionals has become popular in Japan over the last two decades. Many professional schools now require students to take an applied ethics or professional ethics course. In contrast, very few courses of professional ethics for teaching exist or have been taught in Japan. In order to obtain suggestions for teacher education, this paper reviews and examines practices of ethics education for engineers and nurses in Japan that have been successfully implemented. The paper concludes that difficulties in professional ethics education in Japan are caused by the fact that both teachers and students lack experience in leading and participating in discussion-based classes and misunderstand the effectiveness of a case-based pedagogy. It also suggests that we need to offer teachers systematic opportunities to be trained to be proficient in enabling students to be active and critical in class.

This paper describes the achievements of an innovative eight-year research program first introduced in Mizoguchi and Bourdeau (2000), which was aimed at building a theory-aware authoring system by using ontological engineering. To date, we have proposed OMNIBUS, an ontology that comprehensively covers different learning/instructional theories and paradigms, and SMARTIES, a theory-aware and standards-compliant authoring system to create learning/instructional scenarios based on OMNIBUS. This approach was intended to bridge the gap between theory and practice in scientific and technological development, including learning/instruction support. The goals of this study included the following: that computers would (a) "understand" a variety of learning/instructional theories based on their organization, (b) "utilize" such understanding to help authors build learning/instructional scenarios, and (c) "make" such theoretically sound scenarios interoperable within the framework of technology standards. This paper suggests an ontological engineering solution to achieve these three goals and describes the implementation and feasibility demonstrations of the basic functions of SMARTIES, a solution that supports the design of learning/instructional scenarios based on multiple theories. Although the evaluation is far from complete in terms of practical use, we believe that the results of this study speak to high-level technical challenges of ITS authoring systems and the other areas of AIED, and therefore constitute a substantial contribution. (Contains 14 figures, 4 tables, and 15 footnotes.)

The phenomenon of women's underrepresentation in engineering is well known. However, the slow progress in achieving better gender equality here compared with other domains has accentuated the "numbers" issue, while the quality aspects have been largely ignored. This study aims to shed light on both these aspects via the lens of mentors, who are at the coalface of guiding female engineers through their education and subsequent careers. Based on data collected from 25 mentors (8 men and 17 women from 8 countries), the paper explores their experiences of being mentors, as well as their views on recommended actions for nurturing female engineers. The findings reveal that the primary motivation for becoming a mentor was personal for men and women. Many mentors from countries with relatively lower female labour participation rates perceive their roles as guarantors of their mentees' successful future career paths, and a similar trend can be found in mentors in academia. The study underscores the need for invigorating mentors' roles in order to secure a more equitable future for engineering education.