The use of the media in delivering higher education offers great potential but also presents various problems at the same time. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the media, especially the multimedia, is one of the most powerful means of supporting thousands of potential learners who needed or wanted to acquire a higher education but have so far been denied the chance. The multimedia allows this great chance by virtue of its variety and versatility.

II Use of Multimedia in the Academic/Educational Fields

II-1 Use of Media in Education

The media, especially TV broadcasts, has been incorporated into school education since its early development stage. In elementary schools, TV programs were included in curriculums as early as the 1960s to supplement for classes of science and social studies. TV programs were useful to show scientific experiments which cannot be easily done in classrooms, while in social studies, showing visual images of faraway places such as foreign countries was effective in learning about them. The use of TV in the classroom has changed little in the past 30 years.

TV broadcasts are also frequently used outside of classrooms, especially in promoting life-long learning. Television has proven to be an effective means of education for working people, housewives and retired people enabling them to study at home. With the aging of Japanese society, expectations are mounting on life-long education offered by TV broadcasts.

II-2 Examples of the Use of Media in Higher Education

Until recently, the media has rarely been used in higher education, perhaps based on the predominant concept that university education can best be learnt using printed materials. This situation has changed drastically with the dramatic decrease in the number of young people, the recipients of higher education, and the increasingly aging society. Many universities, beset with financial problems, vigorously introduced the multimedia modes of communication into education: the multimedia was considered the best medium to fulfill the varying needs of the new type of students who had varying purposes and learning styles. The multimedia was considered to be a most effective tool to supplement the teaching staff, which was limited both in quantity and quality, to maintain the academic standards, and to modernize the external images of universities.

During the 1990s, Japanese universities rushed to set up on-line terminals. The LANs (local area network) were introduced just at the time the Internet was developing. At present, the majority of institutions of higher learning use LANs on campus, which fulfills the roll of an 'intranetwork', which is the use of Internet software and know-how over the university's internal network. As of 1996, over 60% of national universities and over 30% of private universities offered education over the Internet and these figures are increasing rapidly.

While the use of the Internet is rapidly spreading to universities, they are experimenting with interactive lectures using fiber optics and satellite communication. For example, Tokyo Institute of Technology, which has campuses both in Tokyo and Yokohama, adopted two-way TV lectures a decade ago, linking the two campuses via optical fibers. The life-size images of lectures being delivered at the Tokyo Campus appear on the screens of distant classrooms in the Yokohama Campus. Student reactions and questions are monitored on TV screens in the lecture room.

It was decided in 1995 to build permanent earth stations for satellites, thus enabling universities so far lacking optical cables to telecast interactive lecturers via communications satellites. Thus, the interactive image transmission system, originally developed by two campuses or two universities, has been expanded to many universities located in various parts of Japan in a system known as the 'space collaboration system' (SCS).

The SCS came into being in 1996. Working from the National Institute of Multimedia Education, which is the hub station, this system interconnects approximately 100 earth stations such as universities. The system is being used for lecture exchange between remotely-located universities, joint lectures participated in by several universities, symposiums, TV conferences, exchange of research results, delivery of university lectures to technical colleges, etc. In the future, the Space Collaboration System is certain to become a powerful tool to respond to social demand for reorganization of universities and their education.

II-3 The Use of Media at the University of the Air

Ever since the University of the Air was inaugurated in 1985, all of its lectures have been available by television and radio broadcasts using terrestrial waves. Originally, the broadcasts reached only Tokyo and its environs (within a radius of 80km), but the area covered by the University expanded greatly to cover the entire nation when the communications satellite JCSAT-3 came into use in 1998. At present, 160 TV courses and the same number of radio courses produced by the dedicated production staff of the University of the Air are delivered nationwide through broadcast stations owned by the University. Each course, either on TV or the radio, consists of fifteen 45-minute lectures, which are broadcast from 6 am to 12 pm everyday. Each course is broadcast once per week for 15 weeks, which make up a semester. Between lectures are several extension programs that are not counted as part of course units. Regular students study with broadcast courses and the accompanying textbooks and submit correspondence reports or tests and term-end examinations that are used for evaluating the progress of their learning, and then for determining whether or not to grant the credit unit. Currently, the University of the Air of Japan is the only institution of higher learning that offers all of its courses solely through the medium of broadcasting.

The broadcasting media such as TV and the radio, however, can no longer be considered new; rather, they are fast becoming 'the media of the old generation.' The use of the new media forms is still at an experimental stage, but is gradually being adopted in peripheral areas of education.

The University of the Air also offers face-to-face instruction known as 'schooling', independent of the broadcast lectures. Counted as one credit hour, these lessons are given each semester at Study Centers located all over Japan. Face-to-face instruction allows deeper communication between the teachers and students, and thus, is more popular than broadcast lectures. The courses are rapidly signed up for. However, one cannot expect to offer the same quality of face-to-face instruction in all parts of Japan, at the same level of quality and quantity offered in Tokyo, for example. This is why two-way instruction modes are being tested. The details of the two modes are described below.

First is the use of the aforementioned SCS in distance education. As of 1998, there were 99 national universities. A studio has been set up at almost all of these universities to promote SCS. Since the majority of Study Centers are located on or near the university campus, it is possible to offer two-way schooling by connecting the main campus, where the lecturers are, and a large number of Study Centers, where the distance-education students are. The University of the Air started experimental lectures in 1999. Based on the findings, some form of two-way face-to-face instruction is expected to start within the next few years.

Secondly, there is the use of the Internet in the Tutorial System. One of the greatest disadvantages of correspondence education is the inability to promptly respond to students' questions. Using the Internet, it is possible to use the student's own PC or those set up at the Study Centers to send questions to the lecturers through the links established on the University of the Air website. In this way, students are able to receive prompt response to their questions. Although the use of Internet is not without difficulty (e.g., Do all students have a PC? Are they computer literate?), it is considered today one of the cheapest and most effective means of guaranteeing interactivity of learning.