Evaluation of Digital Contents in Education: Examples of English and Health Education Applications in Japan

Abstract

In recent years, new school education using tablet personal computers has become an important issue in Japanese society. In the future, in schools all over the country, virtually all children will own tablets. Paper-based textbooks and teaching materials will be partially or completely transposed to digital form. The government of Japan is paying close attention to digital contents since they have the potential to introduce and rapidly expand interactive and active learning for students. In order to make this type of learning successful, proper evaluation of the quality of digital contents is necessary. We investigated how we can best apply to digital education the system that has been traditionally used to evaluate books and the extensive experience that school libraries have had with such evaluation. We found that a proper digital contents evaluation system can insure the effectiveness of learning activities for a specific learning unit and method of use.