CDIO Regional Meeting - Asia-Pacific

In April of 2018, Kanazawa Technical College (KTC) will open the new school year as International College of Technology Kanazawa (ICT). The educational program planned for this transformation is radically different from anything a Japanese 5-year College of Technology (or Kosen) has tried before. It combines an intensive education on a boarding-style campus with compulsory overseas study and collaborative projects from local communities and industries in a primarily English curriculum. How does a school originally founded to produce factory workers in the Kosen system evolve into an internationally-minded, interdisciplinary engineering school with a focus on authentic design projects? This talk will illustrate the social, organizational, and human factors that have driven KTC to become international in a comparison of the historical context of the Kosen system to modern drivers for change.