E-book technology facilitating university education during COVID-19: Japanese experience

Abstract

UNESCO reported in March 2020 that 84.5% of total enrolled students are affected in some way by COVID-19 pandemic with more than 166 country-wide closures of schools (UNESCO, 2020). Japan too imposed emergency remote teaching and learning at both the 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 e-book platform, BookRoll. BookRoll 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 (AI) in education. Teachers could upload reading materials, for instance their course notes, and associate an audio of their lecture. When students who registered in their courses accessed the learning materials, the system collected their interaction logs in a learning record store. Across the spring semesters from April to July 2020, the BookRoll system collected nearly 1.5 million reading interaction logs from more than 6,300 students across 243 courses in six domains with above 1,900 learners creating more than 78,000 reading logs weekly. While science and engineering courses mainly used the platform, law and language studies courses utilized the feature to upload audio tracks with reading materials. The interaction log analysis of the students with the content revealed that active learning actions, such as the use of annotations on text, were done more in humanities courses. Lastly, recommendations are created based on the analysis and the perception of the teachers about the emergency remote teaching and learning using the BookRoll system for orchestrating their course.