Content creation in the real world is a collaborative task for players of different specialties – design specialists in art and user interfaces, information and communication technology specialists, and subject specialists in a target domain. However, in the traditional curriculum environments of universities, students of higher grades – undergraduate students of junior year or higher and graduate students have fewer opportunities to collaborate with students of other disciplines although they have learned more specialized topics in their own subject domains which would be very useful to others in a collaborative content creation program.

This program is intended to solve the mismatching of the real world needs and university curricula by providing practicum classes for students of different areas to get together in order to create new content. This program will provide several different tracks of practicum from which enrolled students can choose a topic – for example, creating digital photo frames, creating a digital archive of historical videos, creating science communication materials in bioscience for children and general audience, and so on. Each track is designed for collaboration of students from different areas.

On one hand, content creation is a task to create new digital resources which satisfies given requirements of intellectual content and user interfaces using information and communication technologies. On the other hand, content creation has to properly satisfy social requirements – intellectual property, privacy issues, ethics, business and community environments. This program provides a class which teaches the social issues in addition to the practicum classes. All students who enroll in the practicum class need to take this class.

Thus, this program is intended to provide opportunities for students from any subject areas to learn knowledge and skills to create content in a quasi-real-world environment. Last but not least, collaboration by students of different backgrounds will provide an excellent opportunity for students to develop their communication skills with people from different communities.