世論 What Japan Thinks

One popular survey from last year was a survey into what Japan thinks of OpenCourseWare, freely available university material. Recently, goo Research released the results of their second annual survey into these matters, namely making university lectures publicly available.

Demographics

The fieldwork for this survey was conducted between the 13th and 19th of December 2007, with 1,000 members of the goo Research monitor group completing a private internet-based questionnaire. The sample was split 50:50 male and female, with 20.0% in their teens, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, and 20.0% aged fifty or older. By educational history, 7.1% had only completed middle school (although given that 20.0% were in their teens, some may still be in high school), 27.5% high school, 10.8% vocational or other types of secondary schooling, 9.5% junior two-year college, 25.6% university arts course, 12.8% university science, 1.2% university medical or pharmacutical, 3.4% post-graduate or business school, 0.4% overseas university or post-graduate, and 1.2% other.

OpenCourseWare is the term coined to describe this phemonenom, pioneered in the USA by MIT’s OpenCourseWare project. In Japan there is the Japan OpenCourseWare Consortium, JOCW, based at Keio University.

Note that since the last survey it appears that Tokyo Geijutsu University and Hitotsubashi University have stopped offering OpenCourseWare, but Doshisha University, Ritsumeikan University, Kansai University, Kyoto Seika University, and Kagawa Education Institute of Nutrition have started.
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goo Research recently published the results of a survey they conducted into the matter of university lectures being made publicly available, or OpenCourseWare to use the term coined to describe this phemonenom, pioneered in the USA by MIT’s OpenCourseWare project. In Japan there is the Japan Opencourseware Consortium, JOCW, based at Keio University, who have their own OpenCourseWare, including a small English section.

Demographics

The fieldwork was conducted between the 13th and 19th of December last year, with 1,050 people from their monitor group successfully completing a private internet-based questionnaire. The sample was split 50:50 male and female, 19.8% in their teens, 20.1% in their twenties, 19.5% in their thirties, 20.2% in their forties, and 20.4% aged fifty or older. Educationally, 6.1% had only completed middle school (although some of the teenage sample may not have finished high school yet), 26.8% graduated from high school, 8.8% vocational schools, 1.6% 高専 college (this type of college is seems to be a variant of vocational schooling?), 11.3% junior (two-year) college, 26.2% university arts course, 13.1% university science, 1.6% university medical or pharmacy, 3.4% post-graduate or business schools, 0.5% overseas university or post-graduate, and 0.6% other.
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