Construction and Estimation of a Synchronous Distance Education System Using General Purpose Technology for Foreign Graduate Students

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In this study, we constructed a synchronous distance education system for foreign graduate students who remotely take lessons, teach themselves and have a bidirectional communication with teachers or instructors. The system was configured with the necessary modules for the student's learning, such as giving live type lectures, presenting the on-demand type learning contents and managing the learning processes by using the general purposed information devices and general purposed technology, such as the Internet, recent data-streaming technology, and inexpensive hardware and software. The system has the function of remote operation of the video camera set in the classroom by the remote learners. With this function, the remote learner cannot only recognize the characters and figures written on the blackboard, but also experience more active lessons with less boredom. In this system, it is possible to provide the bidirectional communications between all of the learners and instructors during the live type lecture. The lectures using this system have been given about once a week from Apr. 2006. One of the lectures was titled as “Advanced Superconducting Engineering", which was a normal course of graduate school in Fukuoka Institute of Technology. All the lectures were conducted in Chinese and English. Each period of the lecture lasted 70-80 minutes. Several graduate students attended the experimental lectures from China. The analysis result of the questionnaire answered by the students who attended the lectures shows that the system can bring the learners an expected learning effect and a feeling of satisfaction.