How Universities Provide Education Relevant to Interdisciplinary Studies? – Environmental Studies Courses in Research University as IR Survey Using Education Support System

Abstract

How universities provide interdisciplinary education for students such as environment, information, and ethics, flexibly/quickly to correspond social needs under the “globalization”? We need to grasp which graduate schools provide the courses, especially interdisciplinary studies, for universities to provide better education through educational reformations such as establishing new education program and/or collaboration between graduate schools. This request is truly a function of Institutional Researches (IRs). As a trial, we used the search function for syllabi on ELMS as an IR tool, and identified the courses relevant to environmental studies, one of the common interdisciplinary studies, provided by graduate schools in Hokkaido University, one of the 11 leading research universities in Japan. We extracted 240 coursesrelevant to environmental science from 3,006 courses. Although this study only demonstrated how to provide courses relevant to environmental studies in Hokkaido University, we found two way of providing the courses relevant to interdisciplinary research studies: high discipline diversity courses provided by the graduate school founded for corresponding to interdisciplinary studies and/or courses relevant to interdisciplinary studies mainly in their traditional discipline provided by the established graduate schools. This result would be applied to other interdisciplinary studies and other universities.