eBook Technology Facilitating University Education During COVID-19: Japanese Experience

Abstract

UNESCO reported that 90% of students are affected in some way by COVID-19 pandemic. Like many countries, Japan too imposed emergency remote teaching and learning at both school and university level. In this study, we focus on a national university in Japan, and investigate how teaching and learning were facilitated during this pandemic period using an ebook platform, BookRoll, which was linked as an external tool to the university’s learning management system. Such an endeavor also reinforced the Japanese national thrust regarding explorations of e-book-based technologies and using Artificial Intelligence in education. Teachers could upload reading materials for instance their course notes and associate an audio of their lecture. While students who registered in their course accessed the learning materials, the system collected their interaction logs in a learning record store. Across the spring semesters from April - July 2020, BookRoll system collected nearly 1.5 million reading interaction logs from more than 6300 students across 243 courses in 6 domains. The analysis highlighted that during emergency remote teaching and learning BookRoll maintained a weekly average traffic above 1,900 learners creating more than 78,000 reading logs and teachers perceived it as useful for orchestrating their course.

E-book-based learning activity during COVID-19: engagement behaviors and perceptions of Japanese junior-high school students

“…In that, 3,682,944 logs were of the target contents, but we excluded 2,867,481 logs because students’ operation was too quick (less than 3 s) or too long (longer than 20 min), which implies students’ off-task behavior on the material. The thresholds were determined by the previous studies on e-book based learning interactions (Majumdar, Bakilapadavu, et al, 2021 a, Majumdar, Flanagan, et al, 2021 b; Yin et al, 2019 ). Finally, we included 815,463 logs for our analysis (Fig.…”

“…In behavior analysis, we only targeted the completion rate of students in terms of contents. However, several other metrics can be used to gauge the learning engagement of e-book readers in general (Akçapınar et al, 2019 ) and specifically during ERT period (Majumdar, Bakilapadavu, et al, 2021 a; Majumdar, Flanagan, et al, 2021 b). In particular, the school teacher pointed out the impact of differences in the density of teaching materials in different subjects.…”

Learning and Evidence Analytics Framework (LEAF): Research and Practice in International Collaboration

“…It can also be used for sharing links to external recommended contents or resources generated from the recommendation engine [12] . Such BookRoll functions are used flexibly by teachers to orchestrate classes in face-to-face mode [13] or online, either in flipped mode [14] or during remote teaching due to the pandemic [15], [16] .…”

“…During the COVID-19 emergency remote teaching, 243 courses distributed materials in BookRoll and more than 6,300 students actively used it, creating over 1.5 million logs. One of our studies conducted during that period investigated how different subject courses used different combinations of reading and listening materials and their effects on students' online engagement [15] . Meanwhile, the system was also scaled up to expand the services to different public schools across Japan using a cloud-based multi-tenant infrastructure.…”

A Bibliometric Analysis of Technology-Based Foreign Language Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Direction for Indonesia Language Learning

“…Hereinafter, there were several keywords interpreting foreign language studied in the documents related to technology-based foreign language learning during the COVID-19 pandemic such as "English for academic purpose", "English language", "EFL", and "English as a foreign language". It shows that English was the most familiar language studied as a research topic in the COVID-19 outbreak in which some researchers focused their topic on the English language [18], [47], [64], [65], although some other foreign languages were also studied as a research topic such as Chinese [14], Japanese [11], Russian [9], and Arabic [12]. In addition, there were some keywords interpreting measured skills or abilities in the foreign language learning such as "communication skills" and "digital literacy".…”