School of Internet--Building a University on the Internet

摘要

We established an educational system on the Internet by using the existing university educational environment. The education system consists of the three major parts. First part is a lecture on demand system using video, audio and text information from the real classroom. Second part is the assignment system with a mechanism to encourage open communication among students and faculties through writing a feedback to submitted assignments each other. Third part is the course evaluation system with an open policy to keep the quality of the lecture on the Internet. Students, faculties and administrations are three subjects on the educational system on the Internet and we define the education as a sequence of the communication of among those subjects. As an experimental of this idea, we established a virtual school course School of Internet by digitizing the educational activities in the existing university courses, tutorials and special lectures and putting them on the Internet to share. Abstracting the actual university education and putting them on the Internet environment enables to improve or resolve the problems in the current university educational system. By utilizing this method in the real university courses, a continuous and large scale experimentation can be carried out. As a result of one and half years of experiment, 11 university courses and 44 special lectures are archived in 320 hours of video, audio and other media materials. About 2000 registered students are continuously accessing to those lectures. This result proves the usability of this system, and possibility of the transition to the university education on the digital communication infrastructure. The School of Internet started from October 1997 on the Internet. This paper evaluates the system through the result of one and half years of experimentation.