Overview
| This project is conducted by Interdiciplinary
Information Initiative,Graduate School of The University of Tokyo and
National Institute ofMultimedia Education(NIME).
The purposes of this project are to develop and implement a distibutedvirtual university system and to evaluate its educationaleffectiveness. We have built a virtual university called "iii online" which will beon service from April 2002. Students who use iii online can view on-demand streaming videorecordings of lectures, discuss with other learners and faculty staff,and submit reports to earn credits of the university of Tokyo.Contents are basically available to anyone outside the university. The University of Tokyo has the role of providing lectures andmanaging a streaming server. NIME has the role of managing a web-based portal site which all learners use. The portal site building system for virtual university that NIME developed , which is called xGate（eXtended GATE of the university of Tommorow）, provide some web service : 1)learner administration, 2)course management, 3)a discussion board, 4) e-mail service and so on.
The first one of the future directions in this research is to makeacademic alliance among universities which aim at providing somelectures and accepting credits mutually. We hope that the creditsearned at one virtual university can be counted toward fulfilling thegraduation requirements atanother. The second one is to provide learners who take advantage ofthis system with a ubiquitous learning environment using PDAs ormobile phones. |
