Summary and Highlights of Goal Accomplishments
In 2021, the NCCU Higher Education Sprout Project achieved outstanding results due to the combined efforts from faculty and students. Based upon the four main themes of the university’s second stage plan, the major achievements and highlights of the university’s project are described as follows:
Diverse Learning:
Creating the staff allocation system, boosting the double major and minor application and joining the University System of Taiwan.
NCCU reached a new milestone in higher education governance by establishing a faculty and student allocation system based on the principle of diverse learning. NCCU has also eliminated restrictions on minoring and eased up on the double major requirements. In February 2021, NCCU joined the University System of Taiwan and offered its students the opportunities to study science, engineering and biomedicine in other universities because of the domestic exchange programs. With regard to diverse learning, subsidies have been allocated to 99 NCCU courses and a total of 123 teaching positions to enhance its international, inter-university and inter-disciplinary courses.
International Connectivity:
The NCCU Lo Chia-luen International Sinology Chair, global Chinese language teaching and the Austronesian Forum.
With over 2,300 international students which account for 15% of its student population from more than 80 countries enrolled every year, NCCU is among the top 5% universities in the QS Asia university survey 2021 in terms of the number of its international degree students and both inbound and outbound exchange students. Overall, NCCU is one of the top 13% universities in the QS Asia survey with a ranking of #90 in the region.
To enrich its internationalization with a local content, the NCCU Lo Chia-luen International Sinology Chair invited renowned historian Dr. Fan-sen Wang to serve as the third chair, continuing the hard work of distinguished academicians who served as the previous chairs. The Lo Chia-luen International Sinology Scholarship has also continued to be an attraction for international students. To further promote international sinology, the NCCU Graduate Institute of Taiwan History collaborated with Hiroshima University and Ritsumeikan University in its International Studies Program in Modern East Asian History.
To crank its already excellent Chinese language teaching up a notch, NCCU invited linguistic expert Stanfield Professor of Asian Studies Cornelius Kubler at Williams College as a visiting scholar while carried on promoting The MIT x CLC x Chinese Language Massive Open Online Courses. Furthermore, in 2021, NCCU invited former AIT director Professor William Stanton to come as a visiting professor and help get the International Consortium for Asian Studies project started. Apart from organizing Austronesian forums that comprise 13 countries and regions in the South Pacific, NCCU also started putting the Austronesian Volunteer Program into action. Last but not least in terms of international connectivity, NCCU continued to create a friendly bilingual learning environment by recruiting both international teachers and professional teachers from the industries.
E-learning:
Digital courses, Artificial Intelligence and E-learning Center and College of Informatics.
NCCU had already set the e-learning wheels in motion long before the pandemic started. Since the pandemic, NCCU not only has successfully met the challenges with its interactive online courses but also proceeded to subsidize 22 courses with 1,392 registrations (a total of 420 online students, and 59 international students). Moreover, NCCU established the “Artificial Intelligence and E-learning Center” and “College of Informatics” to reinforce the university’s e-learning and future possibilities for academia and industry collaboration.
University Social Responsibility:
Environmental and cultural sustainability, social enterprises, academia-industry collaboration and connections with neighborhood
NCCU is an environmentally conscious university and places great importance on sustainability. The university uses the 50 + 1 Social Enterprises to support local farmers, and its newly opened cafeteria Hero Kitchen Lab is setting out to educate NCCU students and staff to implement the value of healthy diet. NCCU recently joined the newly created Wenshan Consortium of University Social Responsibility and continued to support various Ministry of Education USR initiatives that promote community innovations such as “Prospering Ankang-Benefiting Wenshan Project”. To further advance its advantage in working with the government and industry, NCCU created a new master’s program – Master’s Program in Global Communication and Innovation Technology (GCIT) and started admitting students in Dec 2021. On top of that, two NCCU programs with cultural sustainability in mind and focusing on the promotion of indigenous languages have also started recruiting students: the “Certificate in Taiwan Indigenous Development” and “International Program of Austronesian Studies”.