In usual problem exercises, students are provided information sufficient problems that include necessary and sufficient information to solve them. Under this condition, the students try to find method that can use all information in the problems. They, therefore, sometimes can solve the problem even they do not know the reason why the solution methods can be applied to the problems. Information insufficient problems are problems that do not include sufficient information. Therefore, students have to find the lacking information and complement it. In the problems in physics, we defined information insufficient problems by corresponding lacking information corresponds to values of physical attributes and complement activity to measuring of the attributes. We designed and developed a learning environment for problem exercise of information insufficient problem in physics. We also report the preliminary evaluation of the learning environment and the exercises.

In this study, a collaborative learning support system based on roles of students was developed. Students were able to control an object in a virtual laboratory by using a haptic device as an input/output interface depending on their roles. In order to share information that students could not feel at the same time, they were expected to communicate frequently with their partners. Moreover, we implemented the function of sharing experiences to feel force felt by another student through a haptic device. With the implemented function, sharing the force information at the same time enabled students to share it correctly. In our experiments, it was shown that students could share similar information by communicating information of each experience with their partners. The experimental results indicate that students can share force information efficiently not only by sharing information with each other but also by sharing experiences.

This paper proposes PodReview, which is a portable review of research meetings. The goal of PodReview is to encourage novice researchers to review research meetings with portable media player such as iPod to have a deeper understanding of the meeting contents. In general, it is important for researchers to hold a meeting to produce some beneficial findings. However, it is not so easy for the novices to understand the presentation and discussion conducted in the meetings to find out the benefits. They are strongly encouraged to review the meeting with the handouts, video-recorded material including the presentation slides, and so on. On the other hand, such review is not always conducted since it is burdensome. It is also hard to spare the time to review in the daily research activities. This paper describes a PodReview system, which encourages novices to review research meetings with iPod in a location-free and time-free manner.

Systematic organizational support is necessary to use e-Learning effectively at higher education institutions. This paper suggests the “University e-Learning Management Model” which considers the characteristics of management structure of higher education institutions and the problems of e-Learning. The model has been created based on prior research and our experiences and gone through revisions by applying to e-Learning management of a college in two iterations. Empirical data confirmed the effects of the Model on improved communication and better reaction among stakeholders.

The main topic addressed in this paper is to support university students who start their job-hunting activities by sharing information of job-hunting and work experiences their old boys/girls in the same department had. However, it is not so easy for the students to obtain information concerning such experiences since there are few opportunities to make personal connections with their old boys/girls. In order to resolve this issue, we had developed a SNS (Social Networking Service) system, which helps students gather informal and experiential information. It includes two main services as follows: one is to gather information concerning job-hunting and work experiences from the old boys/girls by means of a theme blog service, and the other is to make personal connections between the students and old boys/girls by means of a search engine and a tracer that allow the students to find informative blog entries contributed by the old boys/girls. This paper demonstrates the SNS system, and reports a preliminary case study in a laboratory scale. The results of the case study suggest that the system enables the old boys/girls to write down their informal experiences with the theme blog, and that the system allows the students to have instructive information from the blog entries via the tracer.

Recently, many foreign students come to Japan. Especially, the number of Chinese students is extremely large in Japan. It is easy for Chinese students to understand Japanese sentences with Kanji because the original characters of Kanji were mainly imported from China. However, it is hard to read Japanese sentences with Kanji because of the difference between Chinese and Japanese pronunciations. This is a serious problem for Chinese students in Japanese universities. Therefore, we derive a new rule of Chinese Pinyin notation and Chinese Reading of Kanji. Further, we construct a learning system for reading Kanji based on the derived rule of Pinyin and Chinese reading. The system is useful to improve the Japanese reading ability of Chinese students. The experiments prove the effectiveness of the proposed learning system for reading Kanji.