Practical Application of Learning Patterns

As an practical application of Learning Patterns, we have handed out the catalog of learning patterns to undergraduate students of our university. The catalog is A5 sized booklet, and the part of pattern description is designed as a double-page spread. We put some thought into designing the booklet, especially for readability and attractiveness.

The catalog was handed out to approximately 3,600 students of two faculties of Keio University, Japan. They are Faculty of Policy Management and Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, which are in Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC). These faculties have implemented an unique curriculum which is interdisciplinary and non-graded. It means all undergraduate students can study any kind of academic areas, for example social innovation, public policy, global strategy, environment, life sciences, and information studies, without reference to their grades and experience.

In addition, these faculties are aimed and designed to provide a inter-disciplinary / trans-disciplinary education for undergraduate students, beyond the conventional disciplines like economics, management, politics, literature, computer science, media art, architecture, and so on. Although the students have a wide variety of interests, we think that the shared competency in the abstract level is to create something on the frontier. A new curriculum which focus on the creativity has implemented from academic year 2007.

Therefore, the students belonging to these faculties should design their own learning, and that is why we made the learning patterns for supporting learning design.

We also open the web site for sharing Learning Patterns at http://learningpatterns.sfc.keio.ac.jp/. The site, unfortunately, is currently available only in Japanease. So I will show some examples of Learning Patterns in following posts.