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Classes on cell phone

TOKYO: The Japanese already use cell phones to shop, read novels, exchange e-mail, search for restaurants and take video clips. Now they are taking a university course using one.

Cyber University, the nation’s only university to offer all of its classes only on the Internet, began offering a class on the mysteries of the pyramids on mobile phones on Wednesday.

For classes for personal computers, the lecture downloads play on the monitor as text and images in the middle, and a smaller video of the lecturer shows in the corner, complete with sound. The cell phone version, which pops up as streaming video on the handset screen, plays just PowerPoint images.

In a demonstration on Wednesday here, an image of the pyramids popped up on the screen and changed to a text image as a Professor’s voice played from the handset speakers.

Cyber University, which opened in April with Japanese government approval to give bachelor’s degrees, has 1,850 students. The virtual campus is 71 per cent owned by Softbank, a Japanese mobile carrier which has broadband operations and offers online gaming, shopping and electronic stock trading services.

The cell phone lectures may be expanded to other courses, but for now they will be for the pyramids course, according to Cyber University. It offers about a hundred courses, including in ancient Chinese culture, online journalism and English literature.

Unlike the other classes, the one on cell phones will be available to the public for free, although viewers must pay phone fees. The catch is that the lectures can only be seen on some Softbank phones. The service may be expanded to other carriers, officials said.

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

He scoffed at those who question the value of Internet and cell-phone classes, noting that attendance is relatively high at 86 per cent. Whether students play the lecture downloads to the end can be monitored by the university digitally.

Although real-time exchange with professors and other students is not possible in Net classes, social networking and other cyber-discussions are flourishing, said Hiroshi Kawahara, Professor in the Faculty of Information Technology and Business. — AP

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