Japan is taking quite a number of progressive initiatives to improve its education system. One of the greatest of these initiatives is to make more classes stop happening in brick and mortar classrooms and instead happen in online classrooms. The most modest version of this is when supplementary material that’s supposed to add to whatever has already been learned in class is posted online so students can study when they’re at home or on their commute. However, there are also more radical measures being taken, including e-learning and distance online learning initiatives. There are already efforts by staff members at many of the most prestigious universities in Japan to craft full online courses for students to take no matter where they are.
The Tokyo Institute of Technology
One such place is the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Here many steps are being taken to shift to online classes. The idea is pretty simple: if a student finds it hard to attend class, then they should be able to access the learning material in their own time. They should have control over the content they consume. If they want they can pause, play, speed up, and slow down videos at will. There should also be captions to each lesson so that Japanese students can teach themselves English while non-Japanese speakers can follow the lessons in a more universal language.
At the Tokyo Institute of Technology, there are efforts to develop, alongside the online courses, an animated mascot character (yuru kyara in Japanese). The mascot is called Sakura Ookayama and helps students through the lessons by explaining difficult concepts to them and helping them to pay attention and to go through the content in the correct manner. While it is arguable that interacting with Sakura doesn’t compare to the real thing, it can also be argued that students learning online will be getting a lot more personalized care than those in physical classrooms with hundreds of other students.
CourseBase and EduBirdie
As it stands, the number of universities making significant efforts to shift to e-learning in Japan is a small minority. However, that number is growing fast. There are hopes that online courses with cross-credit abilities should be developed soon, allowing students to learn from the best professors in the industry without having to go to the actual universities.
But it goes even beyond Japanese universities. There are also efforts by private companies to help in the process. CourseBase, for example, is dedicated to helping graduate students to manage their education. When fresh employees join Japanese companies, they undergo several intense training sessions, whether they are focused on compliance issues or to teach an understanding of the company’s products and processes. CourseBase operates in this market, where it operates as a learning management system, helping employers keep track of employees and letting them know which employees complete training and which ones don’t.
This is a great help to companies. For companies that regularly require employees to undergo some kind of training, it eliminates the need to ferry employees from different company branches scattered across the country to the training facilities. Instead, the learning management system can allow employees to take training sessions from the comfort of their offices or homes while still allowing employers to track their progress.
EduBirdie is another company that helps high school and university students to improve their research and essay writing skills by offering them college paper help and that is the best dissertation writing service with British writers, and remember that service is reliable. By getting well researched and written essays, students can not only improve their knowledge of different topics, but also improve their command of the English language and their essay writing skills.
Eigoo
Speaking of helping students improve their command of the English language, another company that is dedicated to this mission is Eigoo. This company teaches Japanese students the English language through a mobile phone app that matches up students to teachers of English from around the world. The correspondence happens most via chat, since most students use the app when they are on their commute and other places where they really can’t talk. Instead, students ask teachers questions and they get responses in real time.
The teachers themselves come from many different countries outside of Japan, and a student is never matched to a teacher in the same country as them. This promotes cross-national and cross-cultural collaboration in the spirit of learning, and also makes distance non-consequential to the learning process.
Conclusion
Japan is well-known for its technological advancement and large economy. By investing in e-learning, the country will be able to ride the current trends in educational technology to take its population even further. The future can only be brighter.
Author Bio
Elizabeth Skinner is a writer and editor who loves to write about education and technology. She enjoys writing about the latest developments in these areas and how the modern person can take full advantage of them. When she is not writing, she loves to hike and camp.
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