Introduction

Since its establishment in Puli on July 1, 1995, National Chi Nan University (NCNU) has set four development goals of "enhancing the function of overseas Chinese education, promoting international academic exchanges, strengthening talent cultivation and balancing regional development".

NCNU was hit by the 921 earthquake in 1999. However, in the process of rebuilding after the disaster, we deeply realized that Puli has many local organizations with life resilience. Through the connection of external resources and social dialogue, these organizations propose diverse and innovative social solutions in response to local development issues, so that the whole town can have a new development appearance. How to transform these rich social resources into learning materials for university education is one of the trends of innovation and reform in higher education in recent years.

Based on the foundation of past local social development and grants from the Ministry of Education, General Education Center outlined the vision of "Shui Sha Lian University Town" and planned a "social participation course" in 2010.

Social participation course should combine professional knowledge and topic context, select specific topics (fields) and connect stakeholders (groups), plan students' actual topic (fields) observation, participation, resident interaction or program implementation, etc., so as to deepen students' understanding and speculation of professional knowledge, and inspire students' awareness of public issues, action ideas and sustainable actions.

With the promotion of the "University Learning Ecosystem for Taiwan" (大學學習生態系統創新計畫) and " Higher Education Sprout Project" (高等教育深耕計畫) of the Ministry of Education, the structure of NCNU social participation course has been gradually completed. We sincerely hope that through the promotion of social participation course, we can help teachers to develop course plans with community field issues as the teaching content. On the one hand, let the students enter the field to learn, and stimulate the learning enthusiasm of teachers and students in social action. On the other hand, it allows students to collaborate with the field or partners to develop the benefits of learning and working together.