Abstract
Out-of-class study hours of Japanese university students are significantly shorter than those of American university students. Assignments are practical method to encourage students to study. However, professors have many responsibilities and giving feedback to each student is difficult. Effectively utilizing learning management system (LMS) can encourage students to study in out-of-class hours and to lessen professors’ burden of scoring. However, the system is not fully introduced nor utilized in every university in Japan. In this paper, an LMS-like environment was built by using Google Apps in order to solve these problems in a university without LMS. The proposed environment was implemented in an English course for one semester. The result showed that the environment enabled efficient scoring of assignments and effective recording of the students’ learning activities: when given a reading assignment from past EIKEN P1 grade reading sections composed of three question sets totaling 10 questions with 2,041 words, average study hour of the students was 70 minutes. Time required to construct the environment was long but the time required for operation was short, suggesting professors could increase their research activities.
