Making global knowledge accessible to EFL speakers of an undergraduate leadership program through a flipped and ubiquitous learning environment

Abstract

This paper reports on how an undergraduate global leadership course was designed and implemented at a Japanese mid-sized private university to match the Japanese government’s initiative of fostering global individuals through education. By incorporating a flipped learning approach (Bergmann & Sam, 2012) and the content materials from a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), the university was able to offer a global leadership program to Japanese students with some “hidden” English language assistance. The language support was provided by employing Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), a pedagogical approach that is gaining global popularity (Coyle, Hood, & Marsh, 2010). Flipped learning was introduced to maximise the face-to-face class time for the activities to enhance active learning. Content learning was designed to be done online, before coming to every class. In order to support flipped learning and CLIL, ubiquitous learning was also incorporated to the program design. This paper also focuses on capturing the leadership program and develop the understanding of roles of each stakeholder by mapping human and nonhuman actors to see what resources were involved in manifesting this highly complex learning environment. The student perception on the leadership program was compared through interviews conducted in Weeks 4 and 14, to see if the program was successfully perceived as a leadership program, or perceived as just another English language program. Some implications of designing this type of multifunctional course are discussed to conclude the paper.

Keywords

• ubiquitous learning
• flipped learning
• MOOCs
• CLIL
• actor-network theory