A Management of e-Learning in Nagaoka University of Technology (<Special Issue>Studies on Practical Use of e-Learning)

Abstract

Four years have passed since Nagaoka University of Technology started to provide e-Learning courses as formal courses. The university is providing 77 courses and the number of students of e-learning becomes more than 400 in 2004, and this is the domestic maximum scale. This paper proposes an original management method of decreasing teachers' load and administrators' load without lowering the learners' satisfaction even if the scale of the e-learning activity is expanded. The features of the management are as follows: 1. development of an e-learning practice model which enhances autonomous learning with knowledge creation, 2. utilization of a learning management system (LMS) with an intelligent agent which advices learners using data mining of learning log-data, 3. an utilization of an automatic on-line registration system, 4. an utilization of a contents authoring support system which supports development of e-learning contents, and 5. an utilization of a distance management system which enables several administrators to install the e-learning contents to the server from distance places. It is shown to be able to achieve the improvement of expansion of the scale of e-learning without lowering learner's satisfaction rating while decreasing the load of the administrators and the teachers, and shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.