Visit to Keio University

Host: Dr Yoshikazu Yamamoto

My third visit was to see Dr Yoshikazu Yamamoto [ss/»] who is an associate professor in the Dept. of Computer Science at Keio University [»]. Keio is one of the top two private universities in Japan - the other being Waseda. I contacted Dr Yamamoto at the suggestion of Prof Azuma (whom I visited at Waseda University).

Context...

Keio University is the oldest private university in Japan, with a history dating back to 1858. The Dept. of Computer Science is within the Graduate School of the Faculty of Science & Technology [ss/»], which occupies the whole of Yagami campus. The Dept. was established in 1989, originally providing only a postgraduate Masters course. Prior to this, research and education in computing was undertaken within other departments such as the Dept. of Elec. Eng., dating back to the early 1960's. In 1995 the Dept. of Information & Computer Science was established to cater for undergraduate students - it is one of ten such departments within the Faculty.

According to the literature given to me by Dr Yamamoto, in 1999 there were a total of 127 professors, 70 associate professors, 42 assistant professors and 47 instructors within the Faculty. According to their website, the Dept. of Computer Science has ten faculty members [ss]. According to the literature, within the Dept. of Information & Computer Science there are eight full professors, five associate professors, three assistant professors and one instructor. Each of them, without exception, has a PhD from Keio University. Eight of the ten faculty members listed on the website as being within the Dept. of Computer Science are also listed as belonging to the Dept. of Information & Computer Science. (One of the remaining two - Prof Tokoro - is no longer at Keio, and I suspect that the other name appearing on the website should probably also no longer be listed.)

Dr Yamamoto's laboratory [ss/»] has seats for 20 or more students, including final year undergraduates and postgraduates. He currently has four PhD students - three of these work full-time at the University while the fourth is based in industry.

I mentioned that I had read that there are only 30 or so pure computer science PhD's awarded each year in Japan. Dr Yamamoto said that one of the reasons for this is that, unlike in the USA or the UK, the opportunities in Japan for PhD students to supplement their income through part-time teaching are very limited. While postgraduate students often do act as teaching assistants, the payment is very small. On the other hand, Dr Yamamoto thinks that the proportion of CS students who stay on to do a PhD is probably relatively high compared with other disciplines.

Facilities...

Yagami campus is about 15 minutes walk from Hiyoshi train station. Having arrived rather early, I had a coffee in a (the?) student canteen. It was the last day of the summer vacation period, so there weren't very many students around. It felt very sophisticated for a university - there was a grand piano, a TV in one corner, and an enclosed working area with half a dozen seats at a long table equipped with Ethernet connection points and mains outlets. After coffee, on my way to Dr Yamamoto's office I was pleased to see that there was a group of students playing 5-a-side soccer within the campus ... although I wasn't particularly impressed with their ball skills!

Later in the afternoon Dr Yamamoto took me on a tour of some of the teaching facilities. While his office and laboratory are in an "old" building (30 years old), most of the teaching facilities he showed me were in a very impressive new (two years old) building close by. This was the building I had had coffee in. He told me that the new building is semi-active earthquake-resistant - in other words it has passive damping in the foundations combined with computer-controlled active features.

He took me to see an open-plan area with dividers to create individual working areas, each with a desk and chair etc. It occurred to me that I had seen similar working environments in Silicon Valley (California), but never in Europe. These working areas were for the Doctoral students, so each Doctoral student has two desks - one in an open-plan area and one within a laboratory. There are a lot of Doctoral students, so there are open-plan areas on several floors of the building. Dr Yamamoto said that the provision of two desks per Doctoral student was probably unique to Keio.

I was also shown several very large teaching rooms full of high-performance PCs. Apparently the ratio of PCs running Unix vs Windows is roughly 50:50. Most if not all had LCD screens, which I imagine significantly increases the seating capacity. Dr Yamamoto said that they generally renew equipment about once every four years. Most of the equipment within the building was purchased two years ago, when the building was constructed. One particularly large room has 130 machines free for undergraduates to use - this room was not designed to be used for classroom teaching.

Dr Yamamoto also took me to see a very smart 150-seat lecture theatre. The multimedia facilities included an OHP/camera projector, and a built-in networked computer so that a lecturer can present material stored on a remote server. I noticed an impressive sound system too.

Every seat in the lecture theatre had a mains outlet socket and an Ethernet connection point (100Mbps), presumably so that students can make notes directly on their notebook computers. I was told that every teaching room at Yagami campus now has these network connection facilities for students, and over half of the teaching rooms at Hiyoshi campus also have such facilities. In addition, wireless network connection facilities are available in some of the smaller classrooms, but this is limited to a maximum of around 30 per class. (Most of these network facilities for students have been in place for two years; for about three years prior to that it was normal only to have one network connection at the front of the class for the lecturer to utilise.)

Each department within the Faculty has its own 100Mbps LAN, and there is an inter-campus ATM network with a capacity of 150Mbps. This year the Dept. of Computer Science will install an upgraded LAN with a capacity of 1Gbps.

I mentioned that I had already visited Kogakuin University and that I was also impressed with their facilities. Dr Yamamoto said that many private universities offer good facilities in an effort to attract computing students, often in newly constructed buildings.

I also mentioned that at Waseda University students are required to bring in their own notebook computers. Dr Yamamoto said that there are no such requirements at Keio.

First Year Computer Literacy...

One of the units Dr Yamamoto leads is a course on computer literacy for first year undergraduates, which is taken by all (i.e. roughly 10,000!) first year students within Keio University. I was fascinated to know how this is organised. The unit is based on a commercially available textbook written by Dr Yamamoto himself. Students take the course in groups of around 100, so there are about 100 groups of students taking the course - each group having 15 weekly 90-minute sessions. The course is essentially a practical course designed to teach students how to use a word processor, a spreadsheet, email etc. The weekly exercises are to some extent tailored to each group - so that, for example, social science students are asked to analyse statistical data supposedly derived from questionnaires while engineering students are given more challenging data analysis tasks to perform. The sessions are held in laboratories that can accommodate in excess of 100 students each. Most of the tutors are not academics, but work in industry. Altogether there are roughly 50 tutors involved in presenting the course.

Naturally the range of the students' prior knowledge about computing is very wide, and some first year students already have the skills that this unit is designed to develop. Dr Yamamoto said that students are allowed to sit the final exam without attending the weekly sessions if they feel confident enough about the material covered by the course. He estimated that whereas ten years ago perhaps 10% of the students were computer literate on entering Keio, the figure now is somewhere around 50%. He also suggested that, despite the recent Ministry of Education initiative aimed at introducing computer education within schools, the first year computer literacy course at Keio will probably still be needed for another ten years.

Dr Yamamoto talked me through last term's exam paper for this unit, which of course was written in Japanese. The paper is designed to be taken within a lab session. Each question requires the student to carry out a practical task, and the solutions must be submitted electronically.

eLearning...

I explained that our first year Java programming units at SBU are designed (more or less) for tutor-assisted self-paced learning, and I suggested that at SBU a large unit such as the computer literacy unit would probably be organised in a similar manner. I asked whether he had considered such an option. Dr Yamamoto said that up until recently the Ministry of Education has dictated that teaching must be "face-to-face", which is incompatible with the idea of self-paced learning. However, the Ministry has recently changed the rules, so no doubt there will be more interest on eLearning in the future.

Dr Yamamoto showed me the (restricted access) website for another of his units, which has his weekly lecture notes available for downloading in both Powerpoint and PDF format. He told me that although he has been doing this for three or four years, most (perhaps 80%) of the professors are not even using computers to deliver their lectures. He suggested that most professors are rather conservative, and generally reluctant to change their teaching methods.

Dr Yamamoto said that there is currently a weekly one hour teleconference-style joint lecture programme shared with Waseda University, conducted via a satellite link. The link is bidirectional so that students at the receiving end may ask questions. For the past two years they have also had a pilot (research?) distance learning project involving some teleconferencing but also recording of lectures for subsequent on-demand video streaming.

Miscellaneous...

Dr Yamamoto said that when they design a new syllabus they generally use the ACM/IEEE guidelines as their starting point. On the other hand, individual professors/lecturers have a fairly free hand as far as the details of their units are concerned. I asked Dr Yamamoto whether he was aware of any significant differences between the material they taught and what is typically taught in the USA, but he couldn't think of any.

In general terms, Dr Yamamoto feels that there should perhaps be more emphasis on the practical aspects of software engineering at Keio. Their course is rather theoretical, although less so than in the top national universities (Tokyo and Kyoto in particular). He thinks that American universities might be a little better in this respect. This is an issue they have been trying to address at Keio. In particular, they have a programme of external industry-based speakers who lecture to the final year students about topical issues and/or case studies.

Students must choose amongst optional subjects starting from the third year of their degree. During the first two years of their degree, computer science students are based at Hiyoshi campus. During this period they typically have about 20 hours per week of timetabled classes, with classes sometimes scheduled to take place on Saturdays. Students then transfer to Yagami campus for their third and fourth years. In their fourth year they are assigned to a particular laboratory, and are expected to attend full time. Postgraduate students are also expected to attend full time.

Undergraduate students learn Java, C++ and PDP-11 assembler, but not HTML or any cgi scripting languages. Dr Yamamoto said that they were more concerned with teaching basic principles, for example about how computers operate and how to design software. Once a student understands the principles, learning a new programming language should be a fairly straightforward matter. He said that many of the students had taught themselves HTML and cgi programming.

It appears that there is no departmental intranet for students equivalent to our SCISM StudentWeb [»], but the faculty administration have set up a faculty-wide intranet which includes a unit registration (i.e. option choice) system. This was established a couple of years ago.

According to the literature given to me by Dr Yamamoto, in 1999 a total of 983 first year undergraduate students were admitted to the Faculty of Science & Technology as a whole. Of these, 582 entered as a result of taking the entrance examination, 228 entered on recommendations from designated senior high schools and 164 entered from senior high schools affiliated to Keio University. In addition there were seven ex-patriot Japanese students. Only two international students were admitted that year.

Acknowledgement

I am indebted to Dr Yamamoto for checking this report, correcting a couple of errors and supplying some additional details.