NEWS

For about a month from November 9, 2023, 52 students (33 Japanese students and 19 international students, including students from Osaka University, Kobe University, and Fukushima University (ICL-Channels partner universities)) enrolled in Global Human Resources (What is glocal mind ?) [Faculty: Hirokazu Nagata, Yu Sengoku] and 33 students from Providence University (PU) participated in COIL.

With tourism as the main theme, we had Mr. Yoshihiro Matsuki, Corporate Planning Department, Alpico Holdings Co., Ltd. as a keynote speaker and program supervisor.

Starting from the keynote lecture on "Inbound Demand in Matsumoto City, Latest Situation and Future Issues" on November 9, a lecture on "Tourism Marketing, Japan from Taiwan" followed by Prof. Yozo Kasai of PU on November 16, and a presentation by the students on December 7.

The theme and assignment for the presentation was "planning a 2-day-1-night trip to Matsumoto City and surrounding municipalities that young people in their 20s (assumed to be international students from Taiwan and Shinshu University) would like to visit, with a budget of 25,000 yen, including 5,000 yen for souvenirs (5-minute presentation by a student from PU). Mixed groups (10 groups) from both universities prepared presentation materials and manuscripts while coordinating their schedules during extracurricular time.

In addition, Japanese students created a multilingual self-introduction video. For example, if there were students from Egypt, Korea, and Taiwan in the same group, they first introduced themselves in Japanese for about 30 seconds, and then did the same in Arabic, Korean, and Chinese. For non-Japanese languages, the overseas students gave one-on-one speech lessons for the Japanese students.

Some of the comments from the students after the presentation were as follows: "It was a valuable experience for me to have a joint class with Taiwanese students. Since the activity included international students from Shinshu University, I was able to notice the difference in culture and sense of time, which was a great learning experience in this class. It was also an opportunity to learn what kind of things foreigners would like to see if they came to Nagano Prefecture. Surprisingly, many of them said that they would rather like experience tourism instead of just sightseeing. This assignment was made possible by the support of the Taiwanese students. I really can't thank them enough."