E-Knowledge Consortium Shikoku: E-Learning Activities on Local University Alliance

Shikoku is an island of Japan. To create cooperative region where the people can share the awareness of “Shikoku is one community”, eight universities in Shikoku established e-Knowledge Consortium Shikoku (eK4) for realizing educational collaboration by e-Learning for the purpose of human resource development for Shikoku region. The consortium organizes e-Learning contents of the characteristic lectures of the eight universities in order to provide e-Learning courses among them. The e-Learning infrastructure of eK4 has typical features of distributed LMS and Shibboleth identification. eK4 has provided serval e-Learning courses based on credit transfer system since 2010. This chapter describes eK4 as a local university alliance and the educational activities in the viewpoint of providing e-Learning courses.

Keywords: Chipla-e project, Distributed LMS, e-Knowledge Consortium Shikoku, e-Learning, eK4, Human resource development, Local university alliance, Shibboleth, Shikoku, Study of Shikoku.