Practical study of instructional environments for lifelong e-learning

Kumamoto University provides an e-Learning program for local citizens called as "e-Learning Station" supported by the Community Contribution Special Support Activities Budget, which was established to promote contributions to the community by national universities. The e-Learning Station did trial content delivery during spring, 2004, in order to check a system and contents by monitors' responses. Eight open courses are provided on WebCT as a Learning Management System (LMS), and around a hundred citizens participated the experiment Each participant took one or several courses from "Introduction to Personal Computer", "Office Applications", "Introduction to Computer Science", "Network Security", "Building a Web Page", "IT ethics", "Introduction Course: Computer Structure", and "Introduction to Statistics". Various kinds of data were gathered, for example, age groups, occupations, motivations, attractions of lifelong eLearning, and so on. They were investigated statistically and will be shown as some graphs in the paper. The e-Learning Station has been started from September, 2004, with several improvements from the experiment The number of courses was increased to about twenty within five fields (not only natural sciences). Moodle is now used as LMS instead of WebCT, where the number of learners is basically unlimited and various customizations of LMS has been done for open courses. The latest results will also be shown in the paper.