On May 29th, a Staff Development (SD) seminar was held with Suranaree University of Technology (SUT, Thailand) and Shibaura Institute of Technology (SIT), where 70 members of faculty and staff attended along with SUT Vice President, Santi Maensiri. SUT is one of SIT's partner universities.

Department of the Center for Educational Services (CES) has been established at SUT to improve the quality of education, management and teaching methods by observing the lectures and laboratories of other universities. Members of CES attended the seminar with goals to learn about SIT's approach towards educational programs.

The seminar not only consisted of a one-way lecture to explain the characteristics of SIT, but also included activities where SIT faculty and staff members participated in learning their own educational policies and programs. This interactive approach represents SIT's aim to express a new way of partnering with universities abroad.

The seminar began with introductions of active FD/SD programs along with SCOT (Students Consulting on Teaching) consulting program, and involved an active discussion of class management method that utilized PDCA cycle.

Other attractive programs were also presented, among which laboratory management methods and Flipped Classroom* approach especially piqued the interests of SUT attendants as the approaches that they were enthusiastic to implement themselves.

In addition to the global PBL held annually with SUT, further exchanges are scheduled through programs such as joint research programs with foreign exchange students and others as well.

At SIT, the university as a whole aims to interact with partner universities to foster broader international perspective.

*" Flipped Classroom" is one of the "active learning" which promotes student's subjective learning. The main purpose of the lecture at university was normally knowledge transfer, so one-way-teaching from the professor to student was focused, resulting in little to no lecture preparation nor review was done on the student's part.

In Flipped Classroom, on the other hand, this knowledge transfer in the classroom is replaced by the student's active learning, where collecting necessary knowledge is mainly done outside of the classroom, before lecture begins. Once the lecture starts, content is dedicated to explaining critical points and applications of subjects, or solve exercise on the premise that students are already aware and understand information related to the subject. The content that was once transferred in the classroom traditionally is "flipped" with what was done outside of classroom, hence the naming "Flipped Classroom (or Flip Teaching)".