November 19, 2021
"Online Education Support Supporter (OES)" ceased its activities in March 2023. For additional information, please visit this page (in Japanese).What are Online Education Supporters?
“Online Education Supporters (OES)” are students who commit to enhancing and promoting online education.
Since the University of Tokyo started to offer online education on a large scale in Spring 2020, the University Center for General Education and Research and the Information Technology Center have been taking the lead in launching university-wide support activities for online education. The utelecon website was established and support services such as class supporters supporting online classes and a common supporter system dealing with technical problems throughout the university have been in place.
As online systems develop, extension service provision becomes indispensable to cover updated systems and frameworks. OES was therefore established in January 2021 to take on a wider range of tasks related to online education while incorporating students’ ideas.
As of November 2021, about 30 of our students are working as OES. These students are of different majors and degree levels. They work together and make use of their expertise and specialties.
Job of OES
OES performs the following tasks in collaboration with faculty members and system administrators. Through this, we aim to improve utelecon and the quality of online education itself.
- Writing articles for utelecon: We write articles about useful information for online classes, such as how to use tools and how to study effectively online, from the perspective of students. We also work with the system administrators to create and update information on new semester announcements and system changes.
- Updating existing information: Information related to online classes is updated daily. Outdated information on utelecon is also updated if deemed necessary.
- Handling copyright: When publishing articles with possible copyrighted materials, such as screenshots of online tools, we check the terms and conditions to see if permissions are granted to publish.
- Creating English pages: To build up content for the utelecon English site, we translate Japanese articles to English articles.
- Operation support for public courses: We support operations of public online courses offered by the University of Tokyo, such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC).
Related Organizations
OES is managed by the Division for Quality Enhancement of Higher Education, Center for Research and Development of Higher Education, in collaboration with other centers and departments depending on the contents of the activities.
List of External Presentations and Interviews
- Takeuchi, A., & Chujo, R. (2021, March 19) Expansion of On-Campus Job and Its Challenges Regarding Online Classes. 28th Cyber Symposium on Online Education and Digital Transformation in Universities and Other Institutions ‘Educational Institution DX Symposia’ (document, video)