On June 6 (Thu.) and 7 (Fri.), eight trainees from the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, including a senior official from the Ministry of Education, visited Kyoto Computer Gakuin (KCG) Kyoto Ekimae Campus as part of a two-week JICA training program entitled "Project for Distance Education Promotion and Organization Enhancement through the Use of Media and ICT for Education: Training to Improve Quality and Quantity of Education through Distance Education.
The group toured the KCG Museum (the first certified distributed computer museum), where computer equipment used in the past at KCG is stored and managed, as well as KCG's educational facilities.For the next day and a half, Associate Professor Koji Ueda of The Kyoto College of Graduate Studies for Informatics (KCGI) gave the students the opportunity to actually use the university's KING-LMS learning system and experience distance learning over the Internet using the KCGI Hyakumanben campus and Polycom system.
In Papua New Guinea, distance education is currently provided via television, and it is expected that distance education using ICT will be introduced in the near future.Although it will take some time before all educational institutions in Papua New Guinea are connected to the Internet, it will not be long before the participants, who are involved in educational administration, introduce distance education using ICT as a model for KCG's educational system.
