Distinguished Educational Practitioners Award

  Dr. Masanori Hanawa received his B.E., M.E., and PhD degrees from Saitama University, Japan, in 1990, 1992, and 1995, respectively. In 1995, he joined the Faculty of Engineering, Yamanashi University, Japan as a research associate. He currently serves as a professor, an assistant of the president, and the director of the center for higher education at the University of Yamanashi, Japan.
  He tried a new teaching style supported by ICT in his own class on communication theory. The significant point of his style was that lecture videos explaining essentials on topics for the class were provided to students online and students received lectures prior to the class. In face-to-face classes, students were encouraged to raise questions, solve problems, teach each other and discuss instead of just sitting silently and listening to a lecture. This teaching style is now known as a “flipped classroom”. Efforts have been made in promoting an industry-university joint research project between his university and Fuji-Xerox Co., Ltd., starting in 2012, and he also contributed in a major way to realizing an easy-to-use tool for lecture video preparation resulting in lower burdens of teachers.
  The flipped classroom has resulted in an increase in preparation time and substantial increases in academic results for students compared with traditional lecture style classes. This outcome has been the driving force for the further development of flipped classrooms in the university. In the wake of a presentation of the outcome at the 29th annual conference of the Japan Society of Educational Technologies in September 2013, various media including The Nikkei, and NHK 'Ohayo Nippon' featured this effort. Even at the 2014 General Conference of the IEICE, it was introduced in a the special session TK-7. Following these research reports and news reports, he has been invited by nationwide universities to give invited lectures on flipped classrooms.
  In this way, Dr. Masanori Hanawa has not only pioneered the development of the flipped classroom method in engineering education but has also led to nationwide expansion beyond the boundaries of the university and engineering education and has achieved extremely great results. It is an honor for the IEICE that a member of the society is promoting such pioneering and influential efforts, and we are sure that it is suitable for the Distinguished Educational Practitioner Award.