Classes on cellphone in Japan

Cyber University is the only university in Japan that offers all of its courses online. Beginning Dec. 5, it will be the only university to offer courses for mobile phones. The courses are available free to the public.

Most Japanese people use mobile phones with Smartphone-like features -- they are able to shop, read ebooks, watch and record videos, send email, browse the Web and many more functions. So this cyber offering of school courses will be a natural extension for the Japanese.

For online courses in Cyber University, the content is downloaded into the computer and is played on a window screen, with images and text in the middle of the screen. A smaller video of the lecturer shows in the corner with sounds. This will form a virtual classroom.

In the cellphone version, the lectures are seen as a video stream on the mobile screen and plays only PowerPoint images.

The university will have one lecture at the beginning and later add more courses. They will add a course on pyramids first. In a demo, the university showed an image of the pyramids on the screen and then changed to a text image when the professor’s voice played from the mobile phone’s speakers.

Cyber University which started early this year in April has more than 1,850 students. The university is majority owned (71%) by Softbank, a Japanese mobile company. The university has government approval and provides various graduate degrees. It offers more than hundred courses including ancient Chinese culture, online journalism and English Literature.

The courses for mobile phones are open to public, but are limited to Softbank phones. Cyber University said it will extend this service to more phone carriers. There are no charges from the university but the phone carrier may charge data transfer fees

Sakuji Yoshimura, who heads Cyber University and teaches the pyramids course, said the university gives educational opportunities for people who find it hard to attend real-life universities. Such people include workers, the disabled and the sick. “Our duty as educators is to respond to the needs of people who want to learn,” he said.

Yoshimura said internet courses are as good as regular courses. Hhe said the attendance is very high for its online courses at 86 per cent. And also, it digitally monitors whether the student watches the whole lecture downloads.

Mobile courses may become good in the future with bigger screens and faster broadband connections on the way, but with existing phones this will not replace neither live or virtual classrooms.

What is your opinion? Will virtual classrooms become the school of the future?