E-learning in Japanese Universities
This article presents an impression of current e-learning activities within Japanese universities based on visits and consultations conducted during the author's sabbatical, as well as a survey of recent literature on the subject. Although there has been a lot of activity in areas such as videoconferencing, so far use of the Internet within most Japanese universities has been restricted mainly to e-mail, marketing and distribution of printable material. There is growing concern about the prospect of competition from prestige universities overseas offering Web-based courses, but given the conservative nature of the Japanese higher education system it seems likely that Japan will continue to lag behind other countries in this arena for the foreseeable future.
Introduction
Given that English is currently the de facto language of the Internet, it is hardly surprising that the countries boasting the highest levels of Internet penetration are those in which the general population consists primarily of fluent, if not native, English speakers. At a recent international symposium on e-learning in Japan many of the speakers voiced their concern that this puts Asian countries in general at a severe disadvantage in terms of competing internationally in the Web-based e-learning arena (Bush, 2002).
Language is surely the main factor that explains why the Japanese have been slow on the whole to embrace Internet technology despite their very strong high-tech manufacturing base, but it is not the only factor. Given a population with a roughly similar level of ability in English, Korea has made better progress, due it seems to greater commitment on the part of the government. In Korea there are already—as of March 2001—nine "cyberuniversities" in operation, with a further seven scheduled to begin operation in 2003 (Jung, 2001). These are private ventures that focus on vocational courses and "lifelong learning" for mature students; roughly half of the students enrolled in their courses are over 30 years of age, some living overseas. Some traditional universities in Korea have also begun to set up Web-based distance learning courses. There have been rather fewer initiatives in Japan, although in the last few years there have been a number of significant developments.
The Japanese Higher Education System
The Japanese education system has been very successful in the sense that Japan has one of the best educated populations in the world, with around 50 percent of people leaving school now progressing to some form of higher education. On the other hand, university professors generally complain that students are rather less academically able and less motivated than they used to be (Arimoto, 2001). Of course this phenomenon is not unique to Japan; the trend towards mass higher education has given rise to similar quantity-versus-quality trade-offs in other countries too.
The higher education system in Japan is broadly divided into two sectors: public (i.e. state-funded) and private. With the exception of Keio University and Waseda University, which are both private, the public universities are generally considered to be more prestigious. In Japan, 73 percent of all university students attend private (as opposed to public) universities, while 92 percent of all college students attend private (as opposed to public) colleges (Yonezawa & Baba 1998). By contrast, in the USA less than 30 percent of undergraduate students attend private universities, and in Europe universities remain primarily government funded.
There is also another distinction: The vast majority of colleges and universities are campus-based "attendance institutions," but around 40 are "correspondence institutions." Different rules apply to these two groups (Sakamoto, 2001). In particular, prior to 1998 the rules governing attendance in institutions specified the amount of class contact time students must receive, so the use of e-learning to replace face-to-face teaching was effectively prohibited. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) relaxed the rules in 1998 to allow up to 30 of the statutory 124 credits (for an undergraduate degree) to be based on "synchronous two-way distance education" such as teleconferencing. The rules were relaxed further in 1999 to allow up to 60 credits to be taught this way. Then in 2000 they were further relaxed to allow these 60 units to be based on "asynchronous two-way distance education"—i.e. Web-based e-learning—possibly in collaboration with foreign universities. (The phrase "two-way" means in practice that professors are mandated to respond to e-mail queries from students.)
Meanwhile, the rules governing correspondence institutions were also progressively relaxed. Originally, up to 94 credits could be obtained through some form of distance education with the remaining 30 to be delivered in the form of traditional lectures. The rules were then relaxed to allow up to ten of these 30 lecture-based credits to be delivered via broadcasting or multimedia technology, and from 2001 it was possible for all 124 credits to be based on asynchronous two-way distance education.
Japanese universities have never attracted many foreign students. Statistics on legal migrants show that while 193,779 Japanese students studied abroad in 2000, there were only 64,011 foreign students within the Japanese higher education system (Intrasai, 2001). The provision of distance e-learning courses will do nothing to address this imbalance. Indeed, the imbalance will probably grow—especially if studying for a qualification from a foreign university via the Internet is counted as "studying abroad"—because the emergence of the Internet has magnified the importance of becoming fluent in English. The problem is exacerbated by declining numbers of people leaving school, and by the fact that qualifications from well-known foreign universities are highly valued since it is generally considered that they require students to work harder than in most Japanese universities, not to mention the foreign language skills gained. On the other hand, given the current economic climate and career uncertainty more adult workers are showing an interest in engaging in distance learning courses.
