Development and Evaluation of National Information Center for Educational Resources

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National Information Center for Educational Resources (NICER) was developed as the Educational gateway to all educational resources in Japan. NICER is the national website in which both instructors and learners are able to search necessary information easily. The system allows users to search for information related to primary and secondary education that reside sporadically across the country in a cross-website manner using LOM or Learning Object Metadata. The categorization used in NICER's system corresponds to that of the Curriculum Standards for elementary and high school education. Therefore information for particular subjects, grades, areas and items can be retrieved readily. In order to allow global sharing of educational resources using LOM, NICER has developed the LOM system with the IEEE-1484 standard in mind, to support the internationalization. NICER in English was also developed for English speakers.Entering keywords is the method to find necessary information, but in the case of Japanese, because of the multiplicity of types of characters in the written language, children may not be able to reach the information they need, because they cannot enter the more difficult forms of Chinese characters they have not yet learned to read or write. In the same example as above, a child may enter the keyword in hiragana, the phonetic syllabary in Japanese, but this may not be recognized in general search engines which only identify with kanji, or Chinese characters of the same word. Our system can recognize keywords in either forms of writing, to support young users.The many supporting tools were also developed for students and educators, and these are well in service through the Internet. The current website accesses are exceed three million per year, which means this NICER are using by many users.