A Development of Learning Management System for the Practice of E-Learning in Higher Education

From 2004 to 2007 our university has a three-year project called ‘GP Project’ which is part of a national project named “Selected Efforts of the Distinctive University Education Support Program” (Good Practice Project, abbreviated as GP Project), with the support of the ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of the Japanese Government. In this project we are challenged to replace more than 30 existing courses with e-Learning. The courses must be seamlessly integrated to a course grade information system which has been already in use for years in the educational affairs section. For this integration we introduced a new Learning Management System which is easy to customize so that it can integrates course grade information and eLearning information. We developed a Learning Management System (LMS) by modifying a commercial LMS WebClass with which is easy to add new functions. The first phase system has been started to work and now we are preparing to integrate the course grade information into the LMS. This paper describes our currently running three year university-wide project and then explains the functions of the newly developed Learning Management System.