Although both commercial and open-source course management systems are having difficulties in acquiring instructor users, the CEAS (Web-Based Coordinated Education Activation System) has much increased the number of its users at Kansai University without such efforts as to frequently open workshops for novice instructor users but with few participants. The CEAS is designed aiming to improve the ‘delivery process’ for the instructor and the learning activities associated with preparation, classroom teaching, grading and evaluation. The authors abstract the structure and expressions from the user interface of the CEAS, and propose the Teaching-Support User Interface for the course management system. As an example of the implementation in our proposal, a BBS function is designed and implemented in our system through combining a general purpose contents management system with ours. The result of the actual classroom use of our system indicates the easiness and smoothness during the operation and the usefulness of the proposed user interface.

Beginners’ programming courses have different learners with different learning processes and understandings. Teachers of these classes cannot easily monitor and assess the learners’ learning levels and give them appropriate advices in the limited class time. Thus these courses need a diagnostic system, which can easily assess learners’ understanding and give them advices. This study firstly analyzed the past programming test results with decision tree and IRS (Item Relational Structure) analyses, and made a learners’ classification model. Based on this model, we developed a Web-based diagnostic system for beginners programming course. The system gives a few questions to learners in decision tree order, shows the diagnostic result and gives advices promptly. Finally this study evaluates the Web-based system on its usability and fitness of the classification model. The result shows validity of the model and high usability of the system.

A large number of foreign students come to Japanese universities recently. The students are required to have an ability of Japanese oral presentations in university classes or academic meetings, where Japanese pronunciation is generally difficult for foreign students. In this paper, we develop a new Japanese pronunciation evaluating system for foreign students. The Japanese pronunciation by foreign students is compared with the standard pronunciation, and the accent and rhythm of the pronunciation are analyzed by the system. The result is displayed on a monitor for the improvement of learners’ pronunciation. The learners can correct their accents and rhythm by the feedback of the graphical result from the system

The authors have developed a learning support system based on question-posing by learners and have applied it to a distributed asynchronous environment since 2006. Based on the results of application, they enhanced the system. In this paper, they analyzed the results of application in terms of effectiveness of the system to a distributed asynchronous environment. As the analytical results, they found the learners who actively posed questions marked higher score of the final examination than the learners who inactively posed, and that the learners who actively posed high quality questions increased the score of the midterm examination to the score of the final examination than the learners who inactively posed. In addition, they found providing the system motivated learners to learn.

We have developed a WBT system named “CollabTest” that enables students to create quizzes collaboratively. Moreover the system has been using for many course works in the trial of our university. From the results of the questionnaires about CollabTest, we obtained such favorable answers as improvement of comprehension levels by creating quizzes, learning effect by mutually solving quizzes created by students, and improvement of learning motivation by peer assessment of quizzes. However, these results were not enough evidence to prove learning effect of CollabTest. In this paper, we formed hypotheses about learning effect expected by using CollabTest and tried to verify them through demonstration experiments. As the results of experiments, we could show that creating, reviewing and answering quizzes by using CollabTest improved test score and the test score is strongly correlated with utilization degree of CollabTest.

We have developed a WBT system, named “CollabTest”, which enables students to create quizzes collaboratively, and have used it experimentally for six years. The result of these experimental uses showed that our system could provide a solution for the lack of quizzes used an online test in higher education. Quizzes created by students are used for the online test in CollabTest, so it is important to ensure quality of the quizzes. We propose a model of peer review for promoting improvement to the quizzes in the peer review process. In addition, we developed a navigation function based on the model and evaluated its effectiveness by using it in the lectures of a university and a junior college.

We were selected to work with “Development of e-Learning Program to help enhance human resource ability based on needs, ” which is a government supported program of fiscal year 2005 to address modern education needs (Modern GP). The objectives of the program are to use e-Learning to further improve education and teaching practices qualitatively for nursing education, to supply high-level nursing practice capabilities, and provide a new environment in which students can study independently in an efficient manner. We prepared portable multimedia terminals (PSP, Play Station Portable; Sony Corp.) as digital nursing dictionary loaded with training material contents prepared for the associated nursing practice areas, and lent them each to students who agreed to use them. Through the evaluation of practices in nursing education, we described that the digital nursing dictionary using mobile multimedia terminal such as PSP is practical for nursing students in experience learning support system.

Recently, many universities have started Web delivery of lecture movies. To retrieve such movies, metadata are indispensable. But, manual extraction of metadata is difficult, if the number of movies is large. Therefore, retrieval method by synchronizing lecture movies and slides based on spatial frequency features is proposed in this paper. In the proposed method, at first, synchronization between lecture movies and slides is carried out. Then, text retrieval of lecture movies is realized using text information described in slides. Experimental results revealed that the accuracy of the synchronization between lecture movies and slides using the proposed method is 99.9%.

We discuss about sustainability in Web-based education to promote both development and maintenance of contents. We introduce several solutions for the sustainability through a case study in Chitose Institute of Science and Technology. In the present study, we arrange development method using a simple model with a use case of UML (Unified Modeling Language). To construct the basic model, we introduce actors of teachers for the lectures, students for making contents and officers who support to provide the authoring environment and the format for making contents. On basis of this model, we manage a project-based learning, where the actors with two types of students are coordinated under hierarchy structures, and interact with teachers managing through the learning.