Example Open Courses of Graduate School of Instructional Systemsat Kumamoto University
Katsuaki Suzuki, Junko Nemoto, Keiko Unaka, Akiko Takahashi, Akie Yoshida
Graduate School of Instructional Systems
Kumamoto University, JAPANksuzuki@kumamoto-u.ac.jp

Abstract
This paper describes a case of open courses provided by an online graduate school thatthe authors of this paper belong. Currently there are three courses offered as opencourses, two of which are in both English and Japanese. The English version of the thirdcourse is now under preparation. The intents of opening these courses are different: (a)opening for the publicity’s sake, (b) providing self-study opportunity for incoming
students prior to the start of the graduate program, and (c) archiving an older version ofa course. Benefits of online programs to provide open courses and future directions arediscussed.

Introduction
Opening up educational resources has
gained high interests in higher education
institutions with many organizational
efforts[1]. Kumamoto University just joined
the Japan Opencourseware Consortium(JOCW) in recognizing such trends with ahope to contribute to the open educational
resources. This paper describes a case ofopen courses provided by an online
graduate school that the authors of thispaper belong, by taking an advantage ofthe fact that almost all of its activities
have been carried out online. The purposeof this paper is to reflect upon the reasons
behind opening up each of the threecourses and foresee what might happen in
the future.
Graduate School of Instructional Systems
KumamotoUniversity
established
Graduate School of Instructional Systems,
as a fully online graduate school for
fostering e-learning specialists, in 2006[2].
In the Master’s program of the graduateschool, competencies or expected skills tobe learned by the students through theprogram are explicitly defined and madepublic, then practical curriculum has been
designed based on the competency list for
the graduates.
Since the program is fully online andtargeted toward working adults who needflexibility in their learning environment,
almost all the learning and teachingactivities are happening online asynchronously. It includes provision of learningmaterials, quizzes for confirming thestudents’ comprehension of the materials,
and discussions on online discussion
boards among students for completing
required assignments in the courses.
Master thesis writing is also guided via
discussion boards so that the interactions
between students and professors can beseen by all other students who are writingtheses, resulting in a virtual version of
weekly thesis writing seminar of on
campus programs.
The graduate school also has theprogram for international students fromdeveloping countries with the support of
the Japan International Cooperation
Agency (JICA), which provided us withthe fund to translate all the contents ofnecessary courses. Thus, fifteen of thethirty courses have been offered both
English and Japanese.
Opening Courses
In 2008, opening some courses on theofficial Website of the graduate school wasproposed upon the graduation of the firstcohort from the Master’s program. In Aprilof 2009, the first course “Special ResearchI” was provided in both English andJapanese from the official Website, by
copying all the contents of 2008’s course ona learning management system (LMS) to
static html files. In July 2009, the second
course “Foundations of Pedagogy” wasopened in both English and Japanese. InApril 2011, the Japanese version of“E-learning Fundamentals” was providedas the third open course. As of this writing,the English version of “E-learning
Fundamentals” and “Foundations ofInformation Technology” (both in Englishand Japanese) are in preparation to beadded in the open course offerings.
Opening courses have been planned anddecided by the faculty meeting of thegraduate school, in which the first authorof this paper is serving as a program chair.
Then a conversion team was formed, led
by the second author and consisted of therest of the authors of this paper. All thecontents of the target courses were taken
as was from a particular term, including
all the materials in the courses. A thread
was chosen from each of the discussion
boards to represent interaction among
students and instructor, then personal
information was eliminated for anonymity.
It can be said that a duplicated course
written in a static html is resemble to theoriginal course on LMS, trying to imitate
what you would see if you registered to thetarget course in the target term when thecourse was completed at the end of theterm.
The English top page of the open course“Special Research I” is shown in Figure 1.
Under the title of the course, suchinformation often seen in syllabus asnames of instructor, prerequisite courses,
synopsis of the course, course construction(three blocks of materials in this case),
textbooks, and assignments and grading
policy are shown. When you click on one of
the blocks, titles of sessions, together withthe assignment associated with the block,
will be shown, from where the students
are to choose a session to start studying. A
total of 15 sessions is available to meet thegovernment standard of a two-credit hourcourse.
In order to imitate the interactive
feature of the discussion board, it wasplanned to integrate an SNS function tothe static html pages for those who want
to write and exchange messages in thediscussion boards. However, it wasdecided not to activate the SNS function
for a while, thus only browsing throughthe contents was permitted at this point.

Figure 1: Top page of an open courseDifferent Purposes of Opening up Courses
The first course “Special Research I”
was decided to make it available on our
official Website for publicity’s sake. Thiscourse is to be taken in the second
semester of the Master’s program as anintroduction to thesis writing. It consistsof introductory methodology to coming up
with research ideas (Block 1), followed bysample research cases directed by each ofprogram’s faculty (Block 2), thencompleted by proposing students’ own idea
for their Master’s thesis (Block 3). It was
thus decided to be an ideal course tointroduce what can be done if somebody
will be enrolled in our Master’s program.
By offering this course as an open course,
more detailed information of our faculty
was to be provided, in terms of who they
are and what they would like to show assamples of their directed theses in thepast. The faculty’s short vita, the syllabusof their courses, and their messages forprospectivestudents
werealreadyprovided in our official Website. However,it was intended to provide more
information in terms of their researchinterest at Masters’ thesis level, trying todraw interests of the prospective students
to whom they can ask for help in relation
to their research interests.
The second course “Foundations ofPedagogy” was made available on ourofficial Website so that incoming students
can start studying it prior to their official
entry to the program (i.e., being allowed touse our LMS with their ID and password).
The master’s program is targeted to those
who has background knowledge in either
education or information technology (IT).
So both “Foundations” courses (one in
Pedagogy and the other in IT) are offered
to fill up the gap in the not-yet-studiedarea(s). For example, if a student has beenstudied Education, s/he would be expected
to take the “Foundation of IT” to fill infoundational knowledge and skills at
undergraduate level (e.g., how to create astatic Website). If another student
majored in business and is not familiar
with both areas, s/he is expected to take
both courses.
So, by offering “Foundations” courses, it
is expected that they can study basics oftheir unfamiliar areas, just after (or evenbefore) being permitted their admission,
but before they are given the ID andpassword to log in our LMS. With thecompletion of another foundation course,“Foundations of IT,” which is underpreparation, to be added to our open
course repertoire soon, this purpose will
be fulfilled. Both courses are offered in thecurriculum, as two-hour credit courses asprerequisite to other courses, but notcounted for the fulfillment toward aMaster’s degree.
Anotherintentionofmaking“Foundations of Pedagogy” is rather
controversial, in that the instructor of thiscourse (first author of this paper) declares
this course trying to capture essentials of
three teacher training courses atundergraduate level, all in one course;
Educational
Philosophy,
Educational
Psychology, and Educational Methodology.
If a student entering the Master’sprogram with teacher license, s/he will beexempt from taking this course. However,
the instructor invites those students, evenwith a teacher license, to experience how
the essence of these courses can berecaptured and taught as the basis of
instructional design when an experienced
designer does the work right. It has beenlong said that the teacher preparation
programs are not very well taught (notpracticing what they preach), which was
publicly challenged by making thisparticular course open.
The third and last course of our current
open courses is “E-learning Foundations,”which was made open at the time of majorrevision of the course contents. It was, inother words, aimed at publicly archiving
the old version of the course, when it was
not longer to be used actively.
“E-learning Foundations” was originallyprepared in 2003, as an experimental
graduate-level course to be offered as anopen and distance course by National
Institute for Multimedia Education(merged into Open University Japan in2009). It then became the core of theprofessional certificate program by Japane-Learning Consortium (eLC), which wasin turn used as one of basic courses of theMaster’s program from the start in 2006.
It was in use until 2009, when majorrevision and change of instructor occurred.
It was decided to renew the course to meetthe requirement to be judged as
equivalent to the e-Learning Professional
Basic Certificate of eLC.
So the new “E-learning Foundations”
followed the requirement of eLC’s Basic
Certificate, covering wider area associatedwith e-Learning than the old version, byincluding such elements as trends of IT,
intellectual property issues, and theconcept of project management. It wasthen decided to make the older version ofthe course available on our Website so thatanybody who was interested in the coursewith “historical value” can examine what
was like before the renovation. Someelements may be obsolete, by rapidchanges in the field of e-Learning, butmany contents are still of current value tothe beginners into the field. It was also
intended to give it publicity’s sake,because the more you make resources
openly available, the more people may beinterested in what we offer internally.
Conclusion
This paper described a case of open
courses provided by an online graduate

school. The intents of opening these threecourses are different: (a) opening for thepublicity’s sake, (b) providing self-study
opportunity for incoming students prior to
the start of the graduate program, and (c)archiving an older version of a course.
Converting learning materials on an
LMS to static html files was easy, becauseof the nature of online programs. All
contents were already there, as well asarchived learning activities that took
place during a particular semester. The
intellectual property was already handled
so that the program did not violate thecopyright. Even within the closed areas
with limited access, it is required to getpermission to the copyright holders. Thus,
it was just a matter of converting thematerials from one platform to another.
The viewers of the open courses can have avirtual experience as if they were inside of
the LMS environment.
However, we may not able to keep
opening up all the contents of all thecourses we have, because we do not want
to loose interest of our potential students
applying to our program. We must know
when to stop offering more courses, whileconsidering new features such as an SNS
to be added to the already opened courses.
References[1] Iiyoshi, T. & Kumar, M. S. V.（2008）
Opening up education. MIT Press.
[2] Suzuki, K. (2009). From Competency List
to Curriculum Implementation: A Case
Study of Japan’s First Online Master’s
Program for E-Learning Specialists
Training.
International
Journalon
E-Learning: 8(4), 469-478
Related Web sites
Open Courses from Graduate School ofInstructionalSystems,Kumamoto
University: http://www.gsis.kumamoto-u.ac.
jp/en/opencourses/