版元から一言

Following a trial and error process over the first two years of teaching, and given that our institute is a research-centred graduate school, I set up the outline of the course content based on six topics – learning, flow, creativity, innovation, disruptive innovation, thinking – and used the pedagogical approach, which includes peer discussion, classroom tasks, review of academic research, providing reading materials, and assignment. Surprisingly, with this teaching approach, students could recall their own experiences of individual flow and have aspiration for social flow (see Chap.3); they were also motivated to apply the acquired fundamental knowledge of creativity and innovation to their research area. Moreover, after setting up the new teaching content and tools, students who had already taken this course before attended again to learn from my new style of teaching, even on the severely cold winter mornings.

Of note here is a recently-introduced policy which states that university faculty members are evaluated, in terms of their performances, based on a quantitative index, such as how much in funding or grants they have attracted from outside campus, and how many indexed scientific journal papers they have published. In light of this, many of the professors are not able to spend enough time refining or re-organising their teaching content or teaching methods. However, regardless of personal performances for a teacher’s tenure or annual incentive, it is still valuable to publish a textbook to share my ideas as an educator for students as well as lecturers and researchers. I would be extremely happy if any of the readers were influenced by this book, and I welcome them to create or add their own ideas for enhancing their learning experiences. In addition, I hope this book will give us an opportunity to start an open discussion on the educators or future educators community, so that we can share our constructive feedback on learning at HEIs, which will in turn hopefully foster the innovation leaders.