Developing e-learning content to raise global awareness in a seminar style course

Students created content for an e-learning system in two seminar style courses. In one course Japanese students created e-learning content for teaching technical English vocabulary, while in the other course international students analyzed what materials should be developed to help them start their life and studies in this foreign country. Both courses focused on raising global awareness and understanding of international differences, which is reflected in the resulting e-learning modules. By putting students in a central position, we make sure that both the content and style of the courseware we create will be useful and appealing to the target audience. At the same time, it helps the students to hone their creativity, presentation, and leadership skills. In this paper, we walk through the courses and show the benefits of this approach and the lessons we learned from these courses. Some of the main conclusions are that having a mix of students from different years and backgrounds is very effective to create discussions that broaden everybody's views, and that this can help faculty to find out what knowledge students feel they miss and how students like to be taught. This, in turn, will lead to more to-the-point and more useful courseware.