CURRENT STATUS OF OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES

IN JAPAN

Kumiko Aoki

Center of ICT and Distance Education, The Open University of Japan, 6-11 Wakaba, Mihama-ku, Chiba, 261-8586, Japan

Keywords: Open educational resources, Japan, Practices, Challenges.

Abstract: It has been almost a decade since MIT announced the OpenCourseWare (OCW) project in the spring of

2001. Several institutions in Japan also followed and on May 13, 2005, six prestigious universities in Japan

formed the Japan Opencourseware Consortium (JOCW). Since then, 36 organizations in Japan have joined

JOCW, but its public recognition remains still low. Though JOCW has made a bold initiative and a

significant contribution to the dialog of open educational resources in Japan, still there are a number of

issues remain for long-term sustainability of OER activities in Japan. This paper discusses the issues of open

educational resources in Japan.

1 INTRODUCTION

The “Open Educational Resources (OER)” was

defined by the participants at the UNESCO-hosted

Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for

Higher Education in Developing Countries in 2002

as:

The open provision of educational resources

enabled by information and communication

technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation

by a community of users for non-commercial

purposes. (UNESCO, 2002).

Since then, OER has been a hot topic among

educators, researchers and educational policy

makers though the reality has not caught up with its

ideal as many issues still need to be resolved before

it has been widely adopted by institutions and people

around the globe.

According to Hylen (2007), there are two

important aspects of “openness” in thinking of open

educational resources: free availability on the

Internet and few restrictions on the use of the

resource. They mean no technical barriers, no price

barriers and few legal barriers for the end-user.

These are in line with the definition of knowledge by

The Open Knowledge Foundation that knowledge

should be legally, socially and technologically open.

Though OER is usually considered to refer to

learning content, Hylen (2007) said OER would

include: 1)learning content, such as courseware,

content modules, and learning objects; 2) tools, such

as software applications to support the development,

use, re-use of learning content; and 3)

implementation resources, such as intellectual

property licenses to promote open publishing of

learning content, design requirements for best

practices, and localization of content.

2 MIT OPENCOURSEWARE

It can be said that the movement of OER has been

started by MIT when it announced its

OpenCourseWare (OCW) project in the spring of

2001. Its website said that MIT had started the OCW

project to advance knowledge and educate students.

According to Kirkpatrick (2006), it was envisioned

as “a way to narrow the digital divide, to help

educators in developing countries to ramp up their

curricula, and to assist students and self-learners

who could not afford to attend or meet the entrance

requirements for an MIT education. (p.53)” MIT

published its first OCW site in September 2002,

containing 32 courses initially. In October 2003, it

officially launched the OCW site with 500 courses.

In 2004, MIT OCW received almost 120 million hits

from visitors in over 210 countries, and adapted

Creative Commons licensing to make the intellectual

property licensing terms clear.

When MIT announced its intention to make

course materials publicly available online, many

Aoki K. (2011).

CURRENT STATUS OF OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES IN JAPAN.

In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Innovative Developments in ICT, pages 27-33

DOI: 10.5220/0004471300270033

 SciTePress

faculty members at various universities in the U.S.

voiced their fear that if the university made its

course materials freely available, few would want to

become the actual students of the university by

paying fees. In response to that argument, MIT

clearly states that: OCW is not an education; OCW

does not grant degrees or certificates; OCW does not

provide access to the faculty members; and materials

may not reflect entire content of the course. In other

words, MIT made it clear that distribution of the

content is only a small part of the entire educational

processes and making the content freely available

would not jeopardize the need of formal higher

education.

As many other universities and organizations

have followed the MIT OCW and created their own

OCW, the consortium of OCW was formed in 2005

to advance OCW further and to share issues and

practices. It has become the community of over 250

universities and organizations in the world.

3 OCW MOVEMENTS IN ASIA

The above mentioned OCW movements are also

active in Asian countries. In Asia, many national

governments have supported OCW at top

universities so that teachers and students at other

universities can learn from the materials made public

by the top universities. On the other hand, there have

been many grassroots initiatives in those countries as

well.

China is most active in such efforts as seen in

CORE (China Open Resource for Education

Website). It was originally run by the Chinese

Ministry of Education as a non-profit organization.

It translated hundreds of MIT OCW into Simplified

Chinese and made them available publicly. In

addition, the government funds teams of teachers to

make their courses available online for free for five

years. Over 1,000 national level courses and 10,000

provincial level courses have been made available

through this funding.

In Taiwan, Opensource Opencourseware

Prototype System (OOPS), a volunteer-based

organization, has translated MIT OCW courses into

Traditional Chinese. OOPS was born under the

strong leadership of Lucifer Chu, who has been a

well-known entrepreneur in fantasy arts (Lee, Lin

and Bonk, 2007). OOPS also transcribe OCW audio

and video courses in English so that learners who

don’t have enough listening skills of English (as

many Asian students tend to be) can also learn from

OCW videos in English.

In India, OER has been seen as a solution to

improve the quality of higher education. Originally,

the OCW movement in India was more of the

grassroots level instead of a top-down governmental

initiative as seen in the National Program on

Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL), which

has been carried out by several institutions funded

by the Human Resource Ministry for improving

engineering education in India (NKC, 2007).

Another notable project on OER/OCW is the

Ekalavya project by IIT, which has been mainly

funded by private industries. In 2007, the

government-commissioned National Knowledge

Commission (NKC, 2007) recommended its

government to launch a national e-content and

curriculum initiative in facilitating the creation,

adaptation, and utilization of OER in India (Kumar,

2009).

In Korea, Korea Open CourseWare (KOCW) has

been developed and run by KERIS (Korea Education

and Research Information Service), a governmental

agency under the Korean Ministry of Education,

Science and Technology, since 2007. As of October

2010, there are over 57,000 learning materials

offered through KOCW, including 1290 courses

offered by Korean universities and 646 courses

offered by overseas universities such as MIT and

Harvard. In June 2010, they started offering 70

courses on iPhones as well.

4 JAPAN OPENCOURSEWARE

CONSORTIUM (JOCW)

Among all the countries in the world, Japan is one of

the early adopters of the OpenCourseWare concept.

In May 13, 2005, six top universities in Japan

(Osaka University, Kyoto University, Keio

University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, the

University of Tokyo, and Waseda University)

formed the Japan OCW Collaboration Alliance.

Later it changed the name to Japan

OpenCourseWare Consortium (JOCW) to make it a

more open consortium rather than a closed forum

(Fukuhara, 2008).

Since then, 37 organizations in Japan have joined

JOCW, among which 23 organizations are university

members. A regular member has to make at least 10

courses publicly available. However, when the

author checked all the websites of the member

institutions in February 2011, six out of 23

institutions did not have any courses made public

available online. In terms of the number of courses

that are made available through JOCW, there are

INNOV 2011 - Second International Conference on Innovative Developments in ICT

currently over 16,000 courses, among which about

260 courses are in English. Seventeen member

universities have their own OCW websites where

syllabi and lecture notes of some of the courses each

institution offers are made publicly available. Some

course materials include video clips of professors

introducing the courses and relevant materials.

However, the vast majority of the courses only offer

their syllabi online.

The Center of ICT and Distance Education

(CODE), the Open University of Japan, has provided

the system of searching courses that are available

through JOCW by using keywords. The Open

University of Japan (OUJ) also joined JOCW in

October 2010 and the university has made 17

courses available online to the general public as part

of the JOCW membership requirement. The 17

courses consist of four television lecture series, eight

radio lectures series and five special radio programs.

In the case of OUJ, a lecture series consists of 15 45-

minute video or audio lecture programs; therefore, it

is a significant addition to the JOCW repository of

course materials. Though only 17 courses are made

available online to the general public out of the total

of 341 courses offered by OUJ, all the broadcast

programs are in a sense open to general public

within Japan as all those programs are broadcast

over the air and anybody who has the mean to

receive the signal can listen/view the programs.

As Japan is the number three country following

U.S. and Spain in terms of its membership number

in the international OCW consortium, if JOCW can

sustain its operation and its member universities

continue to make efforts to make the contents

publicly available on the Web, the Japan’s presence

in the OCW movement can be quite high. However,

in considering the most of the contents made

available are only in Japanese, actual impact in the

international community can be relatively small. In

addition, JOCW still seems the gathering place for

researchers of information technology. It needs to

open up its discussion on not only the matters

concerning technology, but also organizational,

political, and educational matters.

5 OTHER OER ACTIVITIES IN

JAPAN

Though JOCW dominates the discussion of open

educational resources in Japan, another notable

initiative regarding open educational resources was

launched in 2005 by the then National Institute of

Multimedia Education (NIME). It is called “NIME-

glad,” a web portal and a search engine for learning

resources in higher education institutions in Japan.

Unfortunately, a governmental decision in 2008

closed the institution altogether though main

functions have been succeeded by the Center of ICT

and Distance Education (CODE), the Open

University of Japan. NIME-glad, therefore, also has

gone in a quandary despite the huge investment

being made over the years to build the database of

learning object metadata and the search engine.

Though NIME-glad has become virtually

defunct, another initiative called UPO-NET was

started by CODE. UPO-NET was originally started

as the platform to share remedial learning materials

among those universities who are interested in using

those materials in their freshmen seminars. One of

the major pet peeves of many universities in Japan is

that the academic ability of freshmen has been

lessened due to the lenient admission policies and

the lack of competition among students to enter

universities. In order for entering students to acquire

university-level academic abilities, they have to

study high school level materials again. To provide

learning materials for those students who need to

catch up with skills of math and English, for

example, to take college-level courses, UPO-NET

was established in 2008. Currently it offers 16

courses ranging from basic mathematics and physics

to the test-taking skills for company recruitment

exams for a fee, and 7 courses mostly on

programming skills for free.

The University of Tokyo, the top-ranking

national university in Japan, is also a notable player

in providing OERs in Japan. So far, the university

has made 87 courses available as OCW. Though the

number of the courses is not very high, but more

than half of the courses indicate that the lecture

videos are provided. However, when I followed the

links to the video clips, many of them indicate

“upcoming” or are broken causing the error. Only a

handful of them actually provide video clips of their

lectures as indicated. This shows the quality of the

overall courses made available through JOCW.

The University of Tokyo is also one of the few

universities which make the podcasting video/audio

available through iTunes U started in August 2010.

Most of the lectures made available through iTunes

U are those special lecture programs that were held

open to public instead of regular classes. The

university also makes those special lecture videos

available through its Todai TV. While the university

makes their regular lecture programs available

through JOCW, it makes those special video

programs available through Todai TV.

CURRENT STATUS OF OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES IN JAPAN

Another notable university worth being

mentioned here is Keio University, a top-ranking

private university in Japan. The university is a

founding member of JOCW and currently the

secretariat of JOCW is located in the university. The

university has made 104 courses available through

JOCW. But, recently its activity seems to have

slowed down and only two new courses were made

available last year.

As described above, it seems that initially several

well-known universities jumped on the bandwagon

of JOCW, but the majority of them are currently

facing severe difficulties in sustaining their activities

in making the course contents available online

publicly.

6 CURRENT PRACTICES OF

SHARING AND REUSING OF

EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES

IN JAPAN

Besides the JOCW initiatives discussed above, how

many institutions in Japan are practicing sharing and

reusing existing free digital materials? The Center of

ICT and Distance Education (CODE), the Open

University of Japan, conducted a nationwide survey

targeting higher education institutions in Japan,

including four-year and two-year institutions as well

as the colleges of technology, in December, 2009.

The main purpose of the study was to find out the

current status of ICT usage in higher education

institutions in Japan and the study was funded by the

Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and

Technology (MEXT).

The total of 5,075 requests is sent, among which

762 went to university central administrative offices,

3,852 went to departments and schools, and 454

went to junior colleges and colleges of technology.

We got the highest response rate from the university

central administrative offices, being 83.2% (i.e., 634

responses); the second highest from the junior

colleges and colleges of technology, being 82.6%

(i.e., 375 responses); and the lowest response rate

from the departments and schools, being 48.7% (i.e.,

1,879 responses).

One of the questions asked to departments and

schools, junior colleges, and colleges of technology

was: “Does your institution share learning materials

with other universities?” Among departments and

schools in four-year universities, 9.9 percent of the

respondents said “yes,” while 2.7 percent of the

respondents among junior colleges and 41.8 percent

of the respondents among colleges of technology

said “yes.” (See Figure 1).

Yes

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

JuniorColleges

DepartmentsandSchools(4‐

Year)

CollegesofTechnology

Figure 1: Does your institution share learning materials

with other universities?

Colleges of technology have the highest

percentage of institutions sharing learning materials

with other universities. This is because those

institutions have started a project for systematic

sharing of e-learning materials called “eHELP” in

2004 with the leadership of Nagaoka University of

Technology. The aim of the project is to promote e-

learning through collaboration among colleges of

technology by making credit-earnable e-learning

courses available to other member institutions. As of

October 2010, 23 institutions are the members and

40 courses were made available online in the

academic year of 2009 and 86 courses will be made

available online in the academic year of 2010. Most

of those courses consist of video-recorded lectures

by professors with PowerPoint slides to accompany

the lectures. Each course consists of a series of 15

lectures and students view those videos online,

submit assignments and take exams to earn credits.

It is also interesting to note that among those

departments and schools in four-year universities

who reported that they were sharing learning

materials with other universities, 60.6 percent uses

learning materials developed in other universities in

Japan; 58.5 percent provides learning materials

developed by them to other universities in Japan;

17.4 percent uses learning materials developed in

other universities in other countries; and 24.1

percent actually provides learning materials to other

universities in other countries. (See Figure 2).

Yes

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

Usinglearningmaterials

providedbyother…

Providingl ear ni ngmaterials

tootheruniversitiesinJapan

Usinglearningmaterials

providedbyuniversitiesin…

Providingl ear ni ngmaterials

touniversitiesinother…

Figure 2: Sharing of learning materials with other

universities among departments and schools in four-year

universities.

INNOV 2011 - Second International Conference on Innovative Developments in ICT

7 LICENSING POLICIES OF OER

IN JAPAN

The ccLearn report (2008) discusses the issues of

intellectual property rights surrounding OER in

many institutions around the globe. The report states

that: 1) The copyright licenses for some OERs are

difficult to find or to understand; 2) The majority of

OER projects have adopted Creative Commons

but some have chosen to craft their own license: and

3) The usefulness of OERs is limited by

incompatible license conditions.

To research how licensing terms of JOCW sites

were displayed, the websites of all the 17 university

members of JOCW were checked. (As mentioned

previously, six out of the 23 member universities do

not offer any courses publicly available.)

The Table 1 below shows licensing terms of the

universities OCW materials.

Table 1: OER providing universities and their licensing

terms.

University License

Doshisha University customized

Hokkaido University customized

Kagawa Nutrition University CC BY-NC-SA

Kansai University customized

Keio University CC BY-NC-SA

Kyoto University customized

Kyoto Seika University CC BY-NC-SA

Kyushu University customized

Nagoya University customized

Osaka University CC BY-NC-SA

Ritsumeikan University customized

Sophia University CC BY-NC-SA

The Open University of Japan none

Tokyo Tech CC BY-NC-SA

University of Tokyo customized

University of Tsukuba customized

Waseda University customized

As shown, 10 out of 17 universities have chosen

to use their own customized licensing terms, which

range from one paragraph statement to the one

spanning a couple of pages. Only six institutions out

of 17 use the standardized Creative Commons

licensing terms that have been adopted by the MIT

Open CourseWare.

8 ISSUES IN PROMOTING OER

IN JAPAN

Major issue in OER activities in Japan is the

funding. Of course, it is the issue everywhere in the

world, but especially in Japan where there is no deep

pocket private foundations like the Hewlett

Foundation that have funded many OER projects in

the U.S. and the U.K. exist. Governmental research

funding and general institutional budget are the

major sources of funding for any organization in

Japan to sustain its OCW or OER activities. The two

disadvantages of governmental research funding are

that: 1) it tends to go to individual researchers

instead of the institution as a whole; and 2) the

project tends to become defunct after the grant

money runs out. General institutional budget has its

problem as it is not well provided unless the project

is well positioned within the organizational strategic

goals. It can also be significantly affected by its

internal politics

Lack of support services in universities is

another major issue. In Japanese colleges and

universities, usually there are primarily only two

groups of people; faculty members and

administrative staff. In general, faculty members are

in charge of teaching and doing research. The other

type of group, the administrative staff, in Japanese

universities is those who are hired as non-specialists.

It’s very rare in Japan that administrative staff is

hired as specialists. In addition, usually the

administrative staff is rotated among departments

and sections every few years throughout their

careers. In sum, it is very difficult for a university in

Japan to hire a specialist or a professional, say an

instructional designer or e-learning specialist;

moreover, it is difficult to educate or train them to

become one at the institution. As a result, faculty

members tend to have to do everything from scratch

to plan, create, deliver, and share educational

materials if they wish to.

Language barrier is another issue. In many

countries where English is the mother tongue or

those other languages which are spoken in other

countries, institutions and individuals have

incentives to share their resources as they have the

potential to attract international attention. On the

other hand, Japanese is only spoken in Japan except

a small number of Japanese who live abroad or

another small number of people who study Japanese.

Unless the resources are made available in English,

the user base tends to be too small to justify the cost

and effort of sharing the materials.

CURRENT STATUS OF OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES IN JAPAN

As mentioned in the previous section, intellectual

property right issues are also a big hindrance. Due to

the confusion and the difficulty of understanding the

licensing terms of digital materials and other

psychological factors, people tend to be hesitant to

share the resources they have created by adapting

and re-using the materials on the Internet for fear

that they may be prosecuted of the copyright

violation. Unless the organization has the system of

clearing copy right of each material created, the

faculty members are not willing to take the risk of

making things available on the Web.

Lastly, there is the cultural issue. Traditionally in

ivory towers where professors have tended to do

what they want to do in their classrooms that are

closed to only students. It requires extra effort to

make the materials online under public scrutiny. At

the same time, professors tend to be unwilling to use

the materials created by other professors.

As indicated by Conole (in press), OER has not

been realized to transform educational practice yet in

Japan, either. In addition, the issue of global

connections has not been properly addressed in

Japan. However, there have been some fertile

attempts made, that are discussed below.

9 INTERNATIONAL

NETWORKING FOR SHARING

AND REUSING OF

EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES

There have been several international initiatives

trying to establish sustainable networks among

institutions and individuals across national borders

to expand the institutional, regional and national

efforts to share and reuse open educational resources.

Some are led by international organizations such as

UNESCO, ICDE (International Council for Open

and Distance Education), and Commonwealth of

Learning (COL). Others are organized at more

grassroots levels with universities in different

countries working together in establishing networks.

Although Japan is far from being very active in

establishing such international networks partly due

to the fact that a majority of open resources made

available by universities in Japan are in Japanese. In

addition, there has not been a major effort in

translating open resources in other languages to its

own language (in this case, Japanese) as seen in the

cases of China and Taiwan.

There has been an attempt made by the former

National Institute of Multimedia (NIME) (now it is

the Center of ICT and Distance Education, the Open

University of Japan) called GLOBE (Global

Learning Objects Brokered Exchange), which has

developed federated search engines combining

learning objects repositories in several countries

including Ariadne Foundation and European

Schoolnet in Belgium, KERIS in Korea, Merlot in

U.S.A.

It has been a challenge even domestically to

have a coordinated effort in creating, maintaining,

sharing and reusing of educational resources among

educational institutions without a government

support. Unlike countries in Europe where the

common European Higher Education Area has been

established and sharing and reusing of educational

resources makes more sense, countries like Japan

have been having difficulties in realizing the real

benefits of open educational resources at present.

It is partly a force of globalisation that is

prompting the OER movement in different parts of

the world. If Japan does not ride on its waves, it

may be left behind on the shores of a solitary island

in the distant ocean.

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CURRENT STATUS OF OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES IN JAPAN