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The environmental targeting policy by the government engendered a debate over sustainable management. In this paper, a theoretical model of sustainable management is proposed to determine the effectiveness of the targeting policy. We set a game with two players as a benchmark model, where player one is a group of companies that have two types of corporate strategies. The first strategy is to pursue the growth strategy via high-energy consumption. Another strategy is to use an eco-strategy that considers the environment. Player two is a group of consumers who may live life either with the concept of "life energy waste" or "eco-life." First, the Nash equilibrium is derived. Then, we introduce the government as the third player. The research question for this paper is as follows: can governmental policy targeting sustainable environmental management, such as CO2 reduction, be feasible in a society? The model in this paper shows that the governmental targeting policy has a positive effect on the feasibility of sustainable management. This is because a correlated strategy assures that the equilibrium exists between the two cases in the Nash Equilibrium. This also assures that the correlated strategy equilibrium is always higher than the two-person game Mixed Strategy Equilibrium. The announcement of the government may act as huge social investment as long as it is considered credible. This paper shows two case studies on leading companies in Japan and proposes economic concepts to explain the conditions in which an eco-friendly target policy is viable. In the resulting Nash equilibrium, under the condition of correlated equilibrium, one can see harmonization of the targeting policy and lifestyle. This result of correlated equilibrium is fundamentally different from the extant solution given by Pigou Tax or Coase Theorem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to elucidate how informal constraints affect formal rules to change institutions through text mining of newspaper editorials that express public opinion on innovation and of official documents of government innovation policies in Japan. By examining Science and Technology Basic Plans that included new innovation policies, this study found that the interaction of informal constraints and formal rules influenced gradual changes in public opinion from negative to positive. Moreover, it is inferable that such a change in public opinion has led to the government's initiative in the hopes of Cabinet approval rating. Consequently, changes in informal constraints also influenced the transition of contents of the Basic Plans. In short, in-house research and development (R&D) reacted swiftly to a shift of formal institutions designed by government, whereas employment practice (called permanent employment) inherent in Japan's labour market did not immediately respond to changes in formal institutional rules. This may suggest the difference in informal constraints based on the underlying cultural and historical factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joichi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab, suggests that the way ahead in education is to support endeavors where learning processes and peer collaborations are valued above end products and exam scores. The divisions and silo-effect of traditional disciplines need to be dismantled and discouraged. Ito calls this antidisciplinary. This paper is an account of an emerging awareness of an antidisciplinary space as undergraduate students designed, built, programmed and created a 3D virtual simulation, termed a Synthetic Learning Environment, viewable in the Oculus Rift Head Mounted Display for elementary understanding of a nuclear power plant accident scenario. The research project did not set out to be antidisciplinary. There was no conscious effort to identify a space and devise ways of working in that space. The antidisciplinary space emerged through pedagogic partnerships and mutually informative collaborations. The emerging antidisciplinary space, with its impact on pedagogical transformation and collaborative learning, is utilized to study the iterative development of the Synthetic Learning Environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan's aging society and shrinking population are leading to serious problems, including a declining level of community vitality in most of Japan's secondary cities. Structural changes in Japan's population are expected to continue for the near future, making sustainable urban design and renovation more important than ever. Proper urban design must seek and evaluate the relevant social information. This research presents a typical case study using a new information evaluation method, the Geographic Information System (GIS), against the background of an aging and shrinking society. It is carried out in Yahatahigasi-ku, a ward in the city of Kitakyusyu, Japan. The ward's land is characterized by steep slopes, which are inconvenient for aged people and reduce their outdoor mobility. Moreover, most of the ward's houses are over 30 years old, the average lifespan for houses in Japan. The quality of the houses is inadequate to the demands of modern life, perhaps explaining the area's inability to retain its youth. As a result, the shopping districts of Yahatahigasi-ku, prosperous in the 1950s and 1960s, are declining in proportion to the number of deserted houses This research explores GIS design approaches as configured for an aging society. It discusses the important factors that flow into an urban design meant to address a declining population, such as the plot ratio, the mixing of commercial and residential spaces, and the placement of public facilities for the aged. The city planner must find the most suitable area for planning. Sustainable urban design requires that new elements be introduced into the traditional configuration; the constructional style of buildings in a mixed-use area will reflect the character of the district. This study considers the GIS urban planning method as a development of the GIS application. We see here the importance of geographic information to urban planning. This paper will exemplify the importance of sharing informational evaluations to the urban planning process. In this paper, a case study of Japan was investigated. It makes contribution on urban regeneration for aging society that also appropriate for cities outside Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The micro-blogging social platform Twitter is being increasingly used nowadays for real-time sharing of news related to a wide range of events, such as elections, protests, disasters, and other news-intensive incidents. In the recent past, the social activity of twittered with sympathies to different political causes has played a major role in several well-known socio-political events, such as the Arab Spring. In a different context, users' twitter feed has helped in a humanitarian disaster relief and rescue in the wake of the 2012 earthquake in Japan. Vast amounts of real-time as well as historical twitter data can be analysed to monitor targets of interest, identify trends in twitter activity, and predict actions on them. In this paper, we consider a case study related to the on-going large- scale and prolonged anti-government protests marches and demonstrations organized by PTI (Pakistan Tehreek Insaf). We analyses the data on twitter activity to identify key hash-tags and propose a model to identify key influences resulting from user's tweet activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An understanding of the sites upon which they are working is crucial to city planners at every stage of the urban design process. Usually, the information (such as population, landform, building conditions, and economic data) is too complex to be processed and reported for analysis through the ordinary statistical approaches. The GIS (Geographic Information System) offers software that can collect related databases for different fields onto one map, allowing both the individual analysis diagram and the compound analysis to be easily achieved. Thus, GIS provides planners a more comprehensive understanding of the site upon which they are working. Our research is an actual urban design project in Japan, an example of the utilization of GIS in urban planning. It is a typical case, with an intricate landform and typical population composition. First, GIS analyzes the basic data, covering landform, construction age, and population. These analyses occur in two stages: first, a comparative study of the population structure over the last 10 years in different landform areas, then the forecasting of its evolution. Using these analyses, the proposal plan tries to improve the residential environment and prevent decline by retaining the local population and attracting outsiders. The introduction of GIS allows digital data to be composited with draft data, resulting in clearer and more precise analyses. This method produced accurate dates for Yahatahigasi-ku, therefore assisting the evaluation of data reflecting the current situation and orienting the next step of the urban design. It has thus been demonstrated that GIS enhances the efficiency of site analysis. We consider this study of GIS in urban planning to be a development of GIS application. This paper presents a new information evaluation method for urban planning that provides more social information on the target area than previous methods and shares the results of information evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In July 1853 Commodore William Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay (then called Edo Bay) determined to end Japan's 220 years of isolation. Recognizing the power of Perry's 'gunboat diplomacy' the Tokugawa Shogunate finally relented and in 1854 opened the ports of Shimoda, south of Tokyo, and Hakodate, in the northernmost island of Hokkaido, to American ships. Disaffected lords in Japan rallied around the Emperor in opposition to the Shogunate's capitulation. This led to civil war, called The Boshin War, between 1868 and 1869. The Emperor's modernized military forces prevailed. Forces loyal to the Tokugawa Shogunate retreated to Hakodate in Hokkaido but were finally defeated in June 1869. Britain's role in subjugating China in late 19th century also had a profound impact on the region. The Japanese rulers, under Emperor Meiji, came to realize that modernization at that time was leaving Japan vulnerable. Subsequently, Japan began to modernize through rapid industrialization informed by western engineers, particularly from Britain, France and USA. What was Japan like in the late 19th century? How did the Japanese citizens react to seeing Perry's gunboats in Edo Bay? What was the relevance of the wars in China? What impact did Britain have on the region at that time? These are questions Japanese children at Elementary school must answer. Therefore, students at Future University Hakodate designed, programmed and delivered a Unity3D educational game aimed at contextualizing the aforementioned events. Following the guidance of Nozomi-chan, a female Japanese avatar, users are tasked with locating information about Edo life, Britain's industrial heritage, China's battle with Britain, and Perry's visit to Hakodate. Users are then tasked to piece together the events as a form of assessment of understanding. The paper details the development of the 3D virtual game, its utilization by Elementary school students, and the observations of the student developers for informed design of future serious educational games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between collective knowledge creation and organizational behavior. The data were obtained during an international internship in which Japanese university students participated in August 2014 in Malaysia. The international internship gave rise to two research aims. The first was to inquire whether collective knowledge can be formed by amateur participants rather than experts who possess technical knowledge. In this project, we observed that amateur students created utilizable knowledge for a manufacturing company. The second research aim was to assess the relationship between trustworthiness and leadership. Who was identified as having leadership qualities? Who can be regarded as a trustworthy person? Can we observe the process by which students grow to trust one another over time? Our research methods involved participating students who answered a series of questionnaire surveys through a website. The creation of collective knowledge was assessed by the scores given by managers in the participating company. Leadership and trustworthiness were analyzed through a network analysis of the students' responses. The results of the network analysis revealed four important findings. First, the managers gave high evaluations of the student proposals, which indicated that collective knowledge was created during the international internship. Second, trust was created among the students, who shared a common purpose with time pressure. Third, a student whom students recognized as a leader did not earn their trust. Finally, students with high leadership scores found jobs in larger companies. Hence, the experiment does not support the belief that a person exercising leadership is trusted by subordinate members. The leadership scores had a positive relationship with firm size, but the trust scores did not. These results suggest that leadership would be emphasized in a society with a high turnover ratio with job recruitment, whereas trustworthiness may be sought in a society with a norm of long-term commitment to a workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this short paper is to examine how dynamic capabilities could be built and leveraged, and how they could impact on firms' learning performances. Zollo and Winter (2002) conceptualize dynamic capabilities as a kind of organizational learning processes. We also assume that building and leveraging dynamic capabilities in organizations could be associated with higher uncertainty and ambiguity, which could be reduced through organizational learning processes. However, dynamic-capability views tend to overly simplify these learning processes. Firstly, we provide a typology of organizational learning modes. Secondly, on the basis of our qualitative case study on a Japanese supermarket chain, the paper discusses how each organizational learning mode proceeds in organizations and how these modes interplay with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Faculty of Industrial Science and Technology at Tokyo University of Science developed a two-campus system to produce well-trained engineers possessing both technical and humanistic traits. In their first year of study, students reside in dormitories in the natural setting of the Oshamambe campus located in Hokkaido, Japan. The education program at Oshamambe instills a rich appreciation/awareness of humanity which especially enables them to empathize with nature. The faculty has been developing a novel e-Learning system called SPES NOVA (Scalable Personality-Adapted Education System with Networking of Views and Activities). SPES NOVA, which is intended to increase competency in communication skills, is based on a remote meeting system that is accessible simultaneously to multiple users via a Flash plug-in on the Internet. To link users in separate locations, each user must have a headset and web cam attached to a personal computer with an Internet connection. At Oshamambe, the SPES NOVA e-Learning system links the students to each other and to the professors. In one of the first applications of SPES NOVA, a student puts on a headset and sits in front of a computer equipped with a camera, and then accesses small-group instruction of a humanity course based mainly on discussion. An electronic whiteboard is displayed at the center of the monitor, and live-action shots of the users are arranged around the computer screen. The voice and picture data of the lecture are stored as educational materials on the server. Consequently, students can review an entire lecture as well as their own speech and behavior. The teacher can easily cut segments from the motion pictures of the lecture and combine them into teaching materials. SPES NOVA includes an e-Learning system that distributes educational materials via a wireless LAN during instruction. The system has also been used effectively in an example of ubiquitous computing in laboratory training courses, which included small group instruction. The students are able to browse the systematic exposition of experimental techniques as well as learn the correct usage of experimental apparatus by using a portable video game player during experiments. The teaching materials contain not only the answers to possible questions, but also the lectures for the day. The e-Learning system can record the laboratory training course lectures and then stream them back in video format. Furthermore, the portable video game player can save images as well as data from the experiments. This e-Learning system is connected to the computer network on campus. Therefore, students can review the learning materials by using a personal computer before and after the laboratory training courses. When used during the small group instruction of the laboratory training course, this unique system effectively helps participants develop lecture note-taking skills, hone communication skills, and learn the correct usage of the experimental apparatus used in liberal arts. Furthermore, with SPES NOVA, we can classify individual students not only according to their academic achievements, but also in relation to their behavior, temperaments, and lifestyles. Subsequently, we can establish a recursive evaluation system for each student. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japanese universities and their EFL programs, when seen together, one may get a general sense that policy aims and actual effects show high-sounding slogans with results mainly in the opposite direction (Yoshida, 2019). A lack of a unified approach to EFL education can be explained at the program level when the following three terms are considered: 1) Bricolage, 2) the MAYA Principle, and 3) Intentional Space creation. Professors, often from eclectically different backgrounds, who are charged with curriculum design, hiring and training, and implementing their EFL program need to recognize their shared participation as something within an entire that will always be larger than the sum of what they can contribute. Hence the use of the term bricolage. Bricolage is a French loanword that means the process of improvisation in a human endeavor. The word is derived from the French verb bricoler, to tinker, with the English term DIY ("Do-it-yourself") being the closest equivalent. MAYA stands for: "Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable," a principle initially constructed by industrial designer Raymond Loewy. MAYA provides users, product consumers, teachers, students, coaches, and literally anyone with enough of what they already use and understand with enough new features that are easy to adopt ("Design - Raymond Loewy the first real Mad Man," 2017). MAYA is never applied nor experienced in a vacuum, always within a predetermined space. Within educational settings, MAYA needs to be applied not just in a classroom but to intentional spaces that include and go beyond the classroom. Creating an intentional space is about validating the students and making them feel valued and belong. It is also about building a dynamic, informed community applicable to learners' lives (Bauwens, 2008). So, what makes an EFL program good? Everyone working hard for the students? Is it teaching in an informed, smart manner? These questions and others were shared and discussed at a medium-sized university's EFL program in Japan. Survey results and discussion outcomes will be shared along with case study-like anecdotes and vignettes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Student Industrial Internship Programs (SIIP) for industry as well as for government sector have been integrated to the curriculum of most of universities worldwide. The main purpose of this internship training is to expose the students to real working environments, where the practical applications are related to the theories they have learned in the classroom. However, the apparent knowledge gap between academic supply and industrial demand impedes the successful absorption of expert skills. In this paper, we present our experience in design, implementation, and deployment of a Web-based Expert Learning System (webELS) that supports SIIP. The designed system incorporates many novel features: first, webELS provides a feedback mechanism for developing didactic materials collaboratively, which is an essential requirement to bridge the gap between academic supply and industrial demand. Second, through a simple web based metaphor, the system allows the mentors in the industry to effortlessly develop contents by using document attachments and few metadata inputs. Third, webELS enables SIIP students to use this system as an expert learning system and facilitates other parties to use webELS as an information portal. Finally, the modular design of the system ensures its flexibility in future enhancements. We have practically deployed the system to support SIIP in DNP (Dai Nippon Printing) LSI Design Co. Ltd. in Japan. Using webELS system, didactic materials are constructed and managed by both university teachers and mentors of industry to bridge the knowledge gap. With three-years (from 2006 to 2008) experimental usage of the preliminary web-based expert learning system we developed, it is shown that with a two-week preliminary student-internship program, the students are progressing their internship course smoothly overcoming the gap between academic knowledge and preliminary expert practical knowledge needed for SIIP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research uses the theoretical lens of transnational mixed embeddedness (Bagwell, 2018) to provide an analysis of the institutional embeddedness of South American Ethnic Entrepreneurs (SADEE) in Oizumi Town, Gunma Prefecture. Taking a social-constructive approach, in-depth narrative interviews were combined with document analysis to understand how and to what extent these entrepreneurs become institutionally embedded in life in Japan. Findings of this study will help to inform local policy makers when developing frameworks and systems to support new types of ethnic entrepreneurship. An ethnic business typically starts when an entrepreneur begins serving other members of the ethnic community and satisfies their specific ethnic needs (Greene and Owen, 1992). No better can this be seen than in Japan. Ninety-seven percent of the population of Japan are Japanese, with the remaining 2% classed as ‘foreign nationals.’ Within the 2%, there are a number of residents who have some form of Japanese ethnicity. Specifically, there are significant communities of Brazilians and Peruvians in Japan. Foreign people with Japanese ethnicity are known as Nikkei and many of them emigrate to Japan for work. Some of these dekasegi (in Portuguese, meaning ‘working away from home’) have gained Japanese citizenship or taken advantage of special visas afforded to them to be able to settle in Japan. Many of the Brazilian diaspora have turned to self-employment as a means of upward economic mobility. This study illustrates what institutional embeddedness indicators have impacted upon the SADEEs journey as entrepreneurs in a foreign country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research is the continuation of a project conducted on Japanese self-initiated expatriate entrepreneurs (SIEEs) working in Southeast Asia. Myanmar is strategically located between India, China and other countries in Southeast Asia and its growth is providing many new opportunities for outside investment. For Japanese companies, Myanmar is an exciting new investment opportunity. There are currently 149 Japanese companies registered with the Japan Myanmar Association. According to Matsui (2017) in the Nikkei News, Honda Motor opened its 115th dealership in Myanmar in 2017, an increase in 40% from 2016. The current GDP per capita is around $1,300, yet the strategic location of Myanmar in terms of its proximity to India means that purchasing power is higher among the border consumers; it is also likely to be Southeast Asia's fastest-growing economy in 2018 (The World Bank, 2017). Taking a social-constructivist approach, five indepth interviews were conducted with Japanese self-initiated expatriate entrepreneurs in Myanmar. This research shows how these individuals develop their careers overseas and take advantage of the business opportunities presented in emerging economies. By examining these cases we can see the types of mindset that entrepreneurs inhabit, how they navigate their social and cultural identities both inside and outside Japan, and the importance of community and brokerage when building new businesses overseas. Compared to Japanese entrepreneurs in Cambodia, those in Myanmar seem less concerned with social entrepreneurship and more concerned with spotting a key niche in the new market, using their skills and experience to exploit opportunities provided by the presence of larger global companies in the host country and favorable economic conditions. By presenting the entrepreneurs successes and failures empirically, research can be used to inform entrepreneurship education, particularly through developing teaching materials that can provide Japanese young people and entrepreneurs with role models as they seek their own employment opportunities in South East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurship education is important for successful economic and social development. Business schools all over the world have become increasingly aware of the importance of entrepreneurship education and collaborative learning to expand global markets. Some previous studies assert that collaboration is a factor for success in higher education. Students improve their attitudes and communication skills by collaborative learning. Other studies argue that individual performance depends on team performance. Although entrepreneurship programs in business schools are often designed as team-based courses, research is scarce on collaborative learning in entrepreneurship education. This study examined the perceptions of collaborative learning in a sample of 17 international and 5 Japanese students taking an entrepreneurship course as part of an MBA program taught in English at a Japanese business school. Japanese students had more than 10 years of work experience. On the other hand, international students of eleven different nationalities had never worked full time or had less than three years of work experience. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in English for international students and in Japanese for Japanese students in June and July 2017. Data comprised 34,685 words in English and 17,433 words in Japanese. The KH Coder text-mining tool was used for qualitative content analysis to visualize concepts in the large text dataset and create a collocation network of linear connections. Results revealed that students reported that class participation and teamwork were important. Both Japanese and international students tend to participate more in group work and engage in class participation. However, their perception of the sessions, awareness of becoming an entrepreneur, and objectives in the course differed by nationality: international students focused on certain sessions such as business model, marketing, and entrepreneurship, although Japanese students remembered most sessions. International students think being an entrepreneur is difficult, but Japanese students thought that becoming an entrepreneur is an experience. Furthermore, international students focused on obtaining employment in Japan, whereas Japanese students focused on international collaborative learning experience and improving their English language skills. Collaborative learning for diverse classes of students should be enhanced in future courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the practical relationship between customer feedback and implementation of service improvements, the problem solving processes and the way of employee participation in customer feedback, the effects of customer feedback on customer service improvement and firm competitiveness, as well as the bottlenecks for employee driven innovation, in the Japanese hospitality industry, based on three case studies: an airport terminal company; an airline company; and a railway company. Firstly, this study has revealed that the majority of the customers' opinions gathered in our case studies were related to the desires for richer service and easier transfer, and comments on the perceived inconvenience at the facilities. In response to those opinions, various kinds of service improvements have been fulfilled. Our case studies have established similar and systematic customer feedback consisting of three or four steps of problem solving processes from data gathering to implementation including feedback, and related employees have participated in the entire processes. At the implementation step, the participation of cross-functional employees is significant. Secondly, this study verified the recognition that customer feedback strongly contributed to customer service improvement and firm competitiveness in the Japanese hospitality industry. Thirdly, we investigated which process to be driven by employees was regarded as the hardest one in the four steps of customer feedback: data gathering; data sharing; implementation; feedback, and what was the important issue in customer feedback. Our case studies evidenced that the hardest step to be driven by employees was implementation or data gathering followed by data sharing. This study observed that the bottlenecks for employee driven innovation included conflicts in the cross-functional implementation and difficulties in the analyses of any opinions concerning customer services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines corporate innovation related with The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, and the subsequent nuclear plant disaster in 2011. We conducted case studies based on an interview survey for Japanese private organizations including a TLO (Technology Licensing Organization) and an association. We prepared three research questions for the interview. The first question was how the disasters had influenced corporate behavior in Japan. In spite of the fact that the disasters delivered negative impacts to a lot of business operations, the organizations participating in the case studies have been assessing their positive corporate behavior from the mid- and long-term perspectives. The second question was how the disasters had influenced technological innovation of Japanese private organizations. We found that the disasters had generated a new direction in technological innovation. Our case studies have examined and confirmed the effectiveness and significance of the current technology, systems and services that each organization had developed and improved. They are now also using their own technology, systems and services in the disaster struck areas as part of CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) and R&D (Research and Development) activities. The third question was what extent of public support for R&D activities was expected by Japanese private organizations in order to enhance their corporate innovation. Our case studies insisted on the importance of not only emergency but also long-term partnerships with central and local authorities. They also pointed out the necessity of risk management performed by governments as regards electricity and telecommunications services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For three consecutive years, the authors have surveyed bachelor and masters students who were enrolled in blended courses at a Japanese university, in order to observe learners' behavior while engaged in blended courses and to develop an technique for organizing blended learning. Although survey results for each year were analyzed and discussed, no overall analysis and discussion have been done to date. Further, within three years, contextual issues for students, as well as teaching staff may have dramatically changed. Thus, being able to extract those changes will contribute significantly to the improvement of blended learning. The aim of this study, therefore, is to show quantitative differences in the causal relationship between learner characteristics and learning behavior across student levels (bachelors vs. masters) and the three survey years. Students were enrolled in two-unit bachelor or masters courses which were taught as blended courses by the same professor as blended courses. Students attended the face-to-face class and were also able to access the online content outside of class. The total number of students with valid survey data was 201 (91 bachelors; 110 masters). The survey instruments measured four constructs: motivation, personality, thinking styles and self-assessment of online learning experience. Three indices were used as indicators of learning performance: "the number of days attended", "the number of completed modules", and "the online test scores". To create common indices for learner's characteristics and learning experience, a factor analysis was conducted by analyzing the data set which included additional same format data from the extended surveys. Total numbers were 558 samples for learner characteristics and 456 samples for learning experience. As a result, revised factors were extracted, namely, four factors for characteristics: thinking style (legislative and judicial), positive emotionality, motivation, conscientiousness, and three factors for learning experience: e-learning evaluation, learning habits, learning strategies. To determine the relationship between these factors, a causal analysis was conducted using the Structural Equation Modeling technique and parameters were compared between groups using statistical tests. Differences among path diagrams for two student groups and three years could provide key points for organizing blended learning. When comparing results between bachelor and masters students, the impact of e-learning evaluation was significantly different. Differences on the impact of e-learning evaluation and "number of days attended" were also detected across three years. For bachelor students, the impact of conscientiousness, e-learning evaluation and learning habits were significantly different across three years, and the impact of motivation, conscientiousness, e-learning evaluation were significantly different for masters students. These differences may have resulted from students' familiarity with blended learning environments and one's level of information literacy. Students' information literacy was measured during one particular year, and then the relationship with common factors was analyzed. Comparing the causal paths between bachelor and masters students, the impact of conscientiousness and information literacy for operational confidence and knowledge understanding were significantly different. These results provide evidence that there are some key points regarding learner's characteristics that need to be considered, and which could help, in the design of effective blended learning environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the learning goals of university instruction is develop students' logical thinking and writing. This is true even with online courses which are gaining popularity in higher education and are taught as blended or fully online courses. E-learning, however, has its restrictions on how learning performance is assessed. Online testing is usually in the form of multiple-choice questions, without any essay type of learning assessment. Major reasons for employing multiple-choice tasks in e-learning include ease of implementation and ease of managing learner's responses. On the other hand, conventional face-to-face classes often employ essay-type examinations for the purpose of assessing the learners' meta-cognitive understanding and ability to build logical structures beyond the understanding of basic knowledge. To address this limitation in online assessment of learning, this study investigated an automatic assessment system as a natural language processing tool for conducting essay-type tests in online learning. The study also examined the relationship between learner characteristics and learner performance in essay-testing. Furthermore, the use of evaluation software for scoring Japanese essays was compared with experts' assessment and scoring of essay tests. Students were enrolled in two-unit courses which were taught by the same professor as follows: blended learning course at bachelor level (n=47), fully online course at bachelor level (n=39), and blended learning course at masters level (n=78). All students took part in the final test which included two essay-tests at the end of course, and received the appropriate credit units. Learner characteristics were measured using five constructs: motivation, personality, thinking styles, information literacy and self-assessment of online learning experience. The essay-tests were assessed by two outside experts. They found the two essay-tests to be sufficient for course completion. Assessment scores from each of the two essays strongly correlated with each other (r=0.67), therefore they were merged to form a single score. Another score, which was generated using assessment software, consisted of three factors: rhetoric, logical structure and content fitness. Results show that experts' assessment significantly correlates with the factor of logical structure on the essay for all courses (r=0.30). This suggests that expert evaluation of the essay is focused on logical structure rather than other factors. When comparing the score of experts' assessment between blended learning and fully online courses at the bachelors level, no significant differences were found (t(73)=0.47, p=.64). This indicates that in fully online learning, as well as in blended learning, learning performance can be measured using essay tests without the need for a face-to-face session to conduct this type of assessment. Further, additional interesting correlations were observed: essay-test scores negatively correlated with "e-learning evaluation" scores (r=-.41); and, the information literacy factor scores of "operational confidence and knowledge" (r=-.47) in blended learning and essay-test scores correlated with "the number of days attended" (r=0.40) in blended learning for masters students. These findings may be related with the content of the courses. Other learner characteristics did not affect students' essay-test scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]