Lectures on self-reflection meditation that KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) opened on ‘Coursera’, an online education service system in which one can hear lectures from scholars all over the world, are garnering great interest.
This course, which opened last December 7 and continued for 6 weeks until January 17, was called ‘Engineering Self-Reflection for Human Completion’. Duck-Joo Lee, Professor of Aerospace Engineering at KAIST, gave the lectures in English.
With about 140 distinguished participating universities all over the world, such as Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Johns Hopkins, Yale, KAIST, and Tokyo University, ‘Coursera’ offers approximately 1,500 courses to more than 17 million members and is considered to be one of 3 major Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) systems in the world alongside ‘edX’ and ‘Udacity’. The New York Times reviews have stated that “Coursera is growing more quickly than Facebook” and is “the most successful of all online education that is currently available”.
After Coursera officially started offering courses in April 2012, KAIST, in Korea, signed into a membership agreement with Coursera, obtaining an opportunity for KAIST’s best professors to offer their lectures to people all over the world. Currently, KAIST and Yonsei Universities are registered as official partners on Coursera.
The 1,500 or so courses on a variety of subjects such as humanities, management, law, journalism, science, and engineering that have been opened on Coursera include almost all humanities and natural subjects.
Over a period of six weeks, and through a total of 46 lectures, Professor Lee’s course, which fit into the subjects of humanities, education, and engineering, easily introduces the necessity of self-reflection, its principle and practice, the mind-subtraction method that changes ‘me’, etc. The course is also colorfully structured with scientific application and the practice of mind-subtraction and interviews with relevant experts.
The course is eye-catching especially because the human mind and mind-subtraction meditation are explained based on knowledge from not only an engineering and neuroscience standpoint, but also from the viewpoint of philosophy and humanities.
Professor Duck-Joo Lee graduated from Seoul National University’s aviation engineering department, earned his Master’s and Doctorate degrees from Stanford University, and worked at NASA as a researcher for three years before starting his current career as a professor in aerospace engineering at KAIST in 1988. He is a global aerospace engineer who has played big roles in developing Korea’s aviation engineering such as being the team leader of the Task Force in charge of developing military helicopters, developing Korea’s first helicopter ‘Surion’, and participating in the launching of Korea’s first space rocket ‘Naro’, and is currently vice president of the Korea Drone Industry Association and vice president of the American Society of Helicopter.
Despite being an engineer, he started taking interest in the students’ character development, which is not his major field of study, when several KAIST students committed suicide four years ago. At the time, the meditation courses that Professor Lee opened to meet the students’ requests for character building, such as ‘My Life’s Turning Point’ and ‘Exploring and Recovering Human Nature’, received great response. Professor Lee says that was possible because he himself had been practicing Ma Eum Soo Ryun’s mind-subtraction meditation for more than ten years.
Thereafter, Professor Lee has been active as a director in the Academic Society for Human Completion, an academic association of character development experts. He constructed the meditation course on Coursera based on such experiences and outcomes from field education. Professor Lee states that, “Through the mind-subtraction meditation method, which is based on self-reflection, one can objectively look back on the life he has lived.” He continues to explain that “when the negative minds are removed through meditation, one’s inner positive energy can be revealed, one can clearly realize the purpose of life, and one learns how to be free and live a complete life.
Innovative companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon place value on Coursera certificates when hiring employees and The American Council on Education (ACE) as well as the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) even transfer credits after course content has been reviewed for eligibility.
Professor Duck-Joo Lee’s self-reflection meditation course is available until February 11. After April, his lectures will be available under the personal development category.
*New course opened under the name ‘Meditation: A way to achieve your goals in your life’ as of May 2018.
https://www.coursera.org/learn/self-reflection-meditation
Source: chosun.com (http://danmee.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2016/01/20/2016012002688.html)