While ILIAS has a very large userbase in Europe, it is becoming increasingly popular in many other countries all over the world. In Japan, Tamoto Shiro is both a satisfied ILIAS user and a multiplier of knowledge. As a contractor, he works with Nagaoka University of Technology as an ILIAS administrator and is also occupied with language maintenance, documentation and video creation. Shiro helps other Japanese users to learn about and use the open-source LMS. We talked to him about his experiences.

At Nagaoka University of Technology, ILIAS is being used as a campus-wide LMS that can serve all students and staff. There are even a few exchange programs available to students from other colleges that are members of the National Institute of Technology. The university has a proper Center for e-Learning Research and Application that is directed by Professor Takashi Yukawa. Assistant Professor Katsuko T. Nakahira decided to introduce ILIAS in early 2011. Since then, over 5000 users have been using the platform. On a yearly basis, about 600 new students sign up for ILIAS and another 450 people access the platform from other organizations.

The decision to choose ILIAS came down to several advantages. Among the most important reasons were, according to Shiro:

Some of the features of ILIAS most widely-used at Nagaoka University include the file download of course materials, report submissions via the Exercise module and the provision of SCORM learning modules. Self-assessments are also used frequently, with some of the schools also doing e-exams. Currently, Shiro and his team are trying to improve the usage of multi-lingual technical terms with the help of ILIAS glossaries.

Despite being geographically detached from the centre of ILIAS development, Shiro is grateful for the support he receives from the ILIAS Society any time he might need it. In turn, Shiro is very active in creating and providing Japanese documentation for ILIAS, helping to grow the community in the Far East. All published documents are provided not only for his own users at Nagaoka University, but also for interested people at other institutions. His goal is to promote ILIAS and make it more popular in the Japanese market. And the best way to do this is by helping others to get information in Japanese on how to manage the system quickly and smoothly.

In the future, Shiro expects xAPI and Learning Record Stores (LRS) to take off. At a recent e-learning exposition in Tokyo, several vendors showed off their related demos, as can be seen in a video Shiro created. The benefits of xAPI are also seen within the broader ILIAS community. xAPI support is currently being designed and will likely be presented at a dedicated workshop in September. „It is our goal to support xAPI with the release of ILIAS 5.4 in late 2018“, says ILIAS product manager Matthias Kunkel. A proper LRS for ILIAS could then be released with ILIAS 5.5 - and hopefully contribute to an even broader dissemination of ILIAS in Japan in the years to come.

If any readers from the ILIAS community in Japan would like to get in touch with Shiro, he can be reached at this  address: tamoto@chic.ocn.ne.jp

The Japanese user guides provided by Shiro can be found here!