This paper first overviews historical trends of learning technology researches and these deployments to real classrooms. There are many research results that are not yet utilized for real learning supporting tools and environments. In this sense, collaborations between researchers and practitioners are still necessary and useful to transfer “low hanging fruits” of research outcomes. Second, goal of education and learning activities are moving from “acquisition and outcome of information” to “acquisition and usage of skills”, which are indicated by ATC21S and EU Key Competences. However, current teachers and school curriculum are not yet ready for this change. Also, learning technology researches don’t have sufficient outcomes on the skill training and evaluation. Researchers should focus on this challenge.

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We have studied how Japanese learners of English interact with each other within the learning communities which have been developed and managed on a Web-based English writing environment. An online discussion forum was set up as a platform with the aid of CSCL (Computer Supported Collaborative Learning) technologies. The use of online discussion forums develops a learner-centered model on the basis of social constructivist approaches. earners create a learning community in the online discussion forum, where they explore ideas, provide content expertise and feedback, and share feelings among participants. To put it another way, learners play active roles in their own learning process. On the other hand, the role of teachers is to be facilitative and supportive. In this study, a virtual member, or a bot, participated in the writing system, which automatically presents model writing, in order to lead students to follow steps properly in their writing processes. Additionally, some expressions are provided based on the analysis of the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English when learners want to refer to them as hints. Consequently, learners can refer to writing from real or virtual members and expressions from parts of the two corpora in the system. The system was used in three English writing courses at a Japanese university. A comparative analysis of the learners’ and the bot’s writing has shown that the bot’s writing helps learners increase their awareness of expressions and sentence structures and promotes writing activities as scaffolding as well as the peer writing. These considerations lead us to believe that our online English writing system supports autonomous and collaborative learning.

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A speech e-learning system of phrase accent and intonation for learners of Japanese is described in this paper. Utterances by native Japanese speakers and learners of Japanese with regard to the phrase /yubinkyokunara/ (literally, “in the case of the post office”) are investigated for developing the system. With the compound word /yubinkyoku/ (“post office”), while the accent is normally placed on the mora /bi/, the current study revealed that a considerable number of informants, including many Japanese natives, placed the accent on the syllabic nasal sound /N/ ― a “special mora” that is normally not accented. Also, some learners mistakenly accentuate the mora /kyo/ or /ku/, and accentuate on two different morae within the phrase. Moreover, an inadequate degree of variation in the fundamental frequency (F0) was observed in some learners’ utterances. Based on the results of the study, thresholds were formulated to serve as standards for determining accent position and the comments for utterance instruction. Finally, an experiment using the e-learning system was conducted, in which phonetic segment labels from speech are used to automatically determine morae, followed by estimates of the F0 for each mora and evaluation of accent and intonation. After instructing using the speech e-learning system, learners with an incorrect accent position were asked to repeat the phrase; in all cases, improvement was seen.

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We launched an experimental lecture of a robot competition that consists of about 60 3rd-year students in a class, newly. The competition aims to equip the students with engineering knowledge and scientific thinking. Acquirement of these skills is influenced by some environments of the experiment. The several factors of the experimental environment are the working period of the experiment, the number of the students in each class, and the number of years from launched year. In this lecture, a curriculum of full year that is adopted in first two years was revised to a curriculum of half year in 3rd year. Therefore, we can compare influence of the working period. In the same period in 2nd year, we gave lectures at two classes that belong to different number of the students. The influence of the number of the students is able to be compared. Moreover, the influence of the elapsed years is able to discussed, because the curriculum in first two years is the same. In this paper, the influences on the skills that the students acquire through the robot competition of the environmental factor are considered.

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The content and methods of education on physical assessment techniques are still in the trial and error stage. Most of the learning materials currently used focus mainly on the cognitive sphere and learning knowledge, and there seem to be no materials in Japan related to the psychomotor sphere for acquiring the relevant techniques. Focusing on thoracoabdominal percussion as an area of high learning need, the aim of this study was to develop self-study e-learning materials to enable nursing students and novice nurses to do chest and liver percussion. The learning content covered three items in the cognitive sphere (pulmonary lobe classification, chest lines, and types and characteristics of percussion sounds), and three items in the psychomotor sphere (percussion technique know-how, distinguishing percussion sounds, and estimating liver position and size). The developed materials were programmed in HTML on Windows, and a web-based system was created. Actual techniques could be simulated on screen, for example, exploring percussion areas using click and scroll, and measuring the size of organs using a point marker and a ruler. Some features include being able to identify areas where percussion sounds change while looking at images, and individualized feedback on points to improve on the percussion techniques implemented. The materials were piloted with five nursing faculty members, who were asked for their opinions on learning effectiveness and content of materials. Positive feedback was received on learning effectiveness, for example, “feedback on specific points for improvement of percussion techniques.” On the other hand, points identified for improvement were “improvement of quality of percussion sounds, careful selection of learning content, and use of learning history.” Issues addressed in the future are improvement of the materials, and investigation of their learning effectiveness in self-study mode.

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In recent years, in Japan, learning outcomes are increasingly demanded to maintain and improve the quality of undergraduate education. Learning outcomes are descriptions of what students are expected to be able to learn, understand, practice, and perform upon completion of learning. Visualization of these outcomes is quite a omplicated task. Therefore, a system which enables us to predict test scores in a short time scale is necessary in order to visualize learning outcomes. In this paper, short-term test score prediction is conducted using the test results obtained from an e-learning program developed by the current researchers. The methods and the results are discussed in terms of pedagogic perspectives.

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Readability formulas have been developed as a measure to predict ease or difficulty of English texts especially for native speakers of English. On the other hand, only a limited number of studies have been directed toward generating readability formulas for Japanese speakers, much less for learners of Japanese. The authors worked on the development of an environment to facilitate their reading practices and automatically create Japanese readability equations based on the study logs of individual learners. In the experiment, Korean university students in the experimental group who were given Japanese articles chosen by the program scored better on a reading post-test than the ones in the control group, who were given articles randomly without adjusting to their reading levels. The overall findings suggest that the effective control of text readability could help improve their reading performance.

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The increasing number of dropouts from higher education institutions has become a problem in recent years. In order to solve this problem, it is necessary to provide care such as individual counseling. Therefore, it is necessary to predict which individuals are highly likely to drop out and therefore require counseling. This paper aimed to improve the predictability of those individuals requiring counseling by utilizing not only the grades (GPA), which have been regularly used in the past, but also the past usage of an education support system.

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The flipped classroom is an inverted version of the traditional learning model. This strategy yields a number of benefits to both learner and teacher. This paper presents a review of an instructional design framework of “flipped classroom on the basis of gamification”. Purpose of using gamification is to try supporting self-learning motivation effectively. A game is structured play, usually for enjoyment. Gamification is one form of the above game-informed education. Gamification is a new coinage. We use of game design elements in non-game contexts. The proposed method based on the gamification could overcome the already mentioned. However, gamification is not necessarily beneficial for all learners. It is necessary to consider uses of gamification according to the varying needs of learners.

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Programming exercises are time-consuming activities for many students. Therefore, most classes provide meticulous supports for students by employing teaching assistants (TAs). However, the programming behaviors of a particular student are quite different from other students’ behavior, even though they are solving the same problem. It is hard for TAs to understand the detailed features of each student’s programming behavior. We have performed data mining over the records of students’ programming behaviors in order to elicit the detailed features of each student’s programming behavior. The purpose of this study is to present the elicited such features for TAs so that they can provide effective assistances. We have performed data mining over the chronological records of the compilation and execution of individual students. As a result, we have found that there is a correlation between the programming activities and the duration time for problem solving. Based on the data mining, we have provided TAs some guidelines for each particular group of students. We have confirmed that our classifications and guidelines are reasonable through experiments over programming exercises. We have observed students who received appropriate guidance based on our data mining improved their programming performances.

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