Credit Accumulation Systems and Learning Evaluation in Higher Education employing Information Technology

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The National Institution for Academic Degrees and University Evaluation (NIAD-UE) grants academic degrees to those who are studying university-level courses without registering as full-time students by evaluating their learning achievements. The recent rise of novel teaching methods by utilizing IT should give profound influence to the development of higher education systems. We studied the trends of e-learning in view of (A) technical, (B) legislative, and (C) quality-assuring aspects.As for (A) technical aspect, the following characteristic features should be noticed : majority of e-learning media shifting toward Internet ; more attention being paid to the improvement of learning contents rather than information infrastructure ; an e-learning consortium being successfully established in Japan, with one hub university and quite a number of partner colleges. As for (B) legislative aspect, the following characteristic features should be noticed : In U.S.A., Higher Education Act was amen … More ded in 1992 to include so-called "50% rule", in which higher education institutions providing more than 50% of the courses via telecommunication means are not eligible for Federal Student Aid, hoping for counteracting against the prevalence of low quality academic degree recipients. Later on The Distance Education Demonstration Program was introduced to relax the legal restriction of distance education, leaving then the problem of federal intervention into the higher education issue. As for (C) quality-assuring aspect, the following characteristic features should be noticed : Open University(OU) in UK has The Credit Transfer System with which credits earned by the students at some external educational institutions are recognized after inspection ; OU also has the OU Validation Service, in which validation of non-recognized educational institutions by OU committee is granted after inspection procedures with the effect of their students acquiring academic degrees issued by OU, thus balancing the widening of academic course and the assurance of quality. Our studied are concluded by the listing future issues of e-learning : importance of bi-directional communication between learners and teachers ; assurance of quality of academic degree in global scale ; more precise balancing widening the academic courses and quality assurance ; needs to explore new evaluation standards for e-learning beyond the traditional university qualification procedures. Less