Abstract:

Project Based Learning (PBL) is one of the most effective educational methods for acquiring the 21st century skills vital for thriving in a rapidly changing society. For example, at the World Economic Forum in 2015, the areas of problem solving and communication were brought up. PBL has been broadly implemented in higher education and its effectiveness has been widely reported.

In this paper, we give an account of a language education course structured as a collaborative project and conducted with the local community. In this project-based course, Design Thinking was implemented as the framework. Design Thinking started in research on the application of designers' methods in engineering and related fields and has been applied as a business model to discover problems based on an understanding of users to propose concrete solutions. It is also used in PBL courses in higher education. Its educational effects have been verified in numerous studies. It is characteristic of Design Thinking in PBL courses for members from various fields to work on issues, empathize with users through interviews, integrate their own ideas with the teams, and collaboratively propose creative solutions.

The authors conducted a collaborative project with English as a foreign language (EFL) learners, Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) learners, and foreigners living in the local community. Due to the government restrictions placed on foreign visitors in Japan, the Design Thinking process by the EFL and JFL learners was conducted through the metaverse space. In this paper, we will provide an overview of the project and share the challenges that we encountered along with the pedagogical implications of the results.

Keywords:

Project-Based Learning (PBL), Design Thinking, English as a foreign language (EFL), Japanese as a foreign language (JFL), Metaverse.