Study into the Media Environment of Japanese Schools
FollowNHK (the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation) has been providing educational services for schools across Japan since the days of radio as an important element in their mission as a public service broadcaster. School radio started in 1935, and school TV in 1953, at the same time as the start of TV broadcasting in Japan. Furthermore, NHK released the online service “NHK Digital Curriculum” providing video and interactive learning and teaching materials linked to school broadcast programmes in 2001 and continues to develop its services to meet the needs of the digital age and the demands of educational reform.
One of the factors that has been supporting Japan’s school broadcasting in its long history, which will soon mark its 80th anniversary, is research. Analysing the data accumulated by the “NHK School Broadcast Utilization Survey” series, which the NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute has been conducting regularly for more than 60 years since 1950, we can see how the utilisation of school broadcasting and other educational media have been transformed under the changing media environment.
The 1990s saw an expanded use of video learning materials and the spread of personal computers, and in the 2000s the spread of the Internet, all of which further facilitated the creation of multimedia environments in classrooms. As the position of school broadcasting gradually became relatively lower, NHK itself started exploring the potential of educational services that employ new technology. “NHK Digital Curriculum” is the fruit of the effort, and now, more than ten years after the launch of the service, more schools, especially elementary schools, are starting to use the service. We are now in an age where schools use NHK’s educational services in diverse ways, via TV and/or PCs, tablets to match the media environment in each classroom.
The authors explore the relationship between media usage and learning in the classroom by analysing the FY2012 survey of elementary, junior-high and senior-high schools across Japan. This analysis showed that digitisation had dramatically advanced in all three types of schools, with more than 90% of the schools having access to digital terrestrial broadcasts. The proportion of schools that utilise NHK’s school broadcast TV programmes and/or digital curriculum remained at the same level as the previous FY2010 survey, but there was a noticeable increase in the number of schools employing “NHK Digital Curriculum”, an educational service for schools available via the Internet. The survey results also suggest that “digital textbooks for teachers” which is attracting social attention, are being disseminated in schools and that there is a growing interest in the use of new media.