ABSTRACT
Travelling to a foreign country is a wonderful way to gain perspectives on one’s own culture and to discover myths and assumptions that would otherwise go unchallenged. Higher education on a global basis is now facing a great issue: universities and colleges have to be responsible for the quality of their education. The concept of assessing student learning outcomes has been highlighted. Teaching and learning issues have been widely discussed in higher education institutions worldwide. For Japanese higher education institutions, for reasons to be discussed in this chapter, the quality of teaching and learning has become a very critical issue. The past decade brought significant changes to the structure of higher education in Japan and government policy towards higher education shifted dramatically. Universities have become more teaching and learning centred. It was observed that, formerly, Japanese faculty tended to be more research and less teaching centred. Since the 1990s, however, a teaching-centred culture among faculty has emerged in Japan, aided by the rise of a number of movements.
