IR Survey Using Education Support System in Research University

For tuning education programs in the higher education, we should identify the status of courses (lectures) in education programs provided by target institutes such as graduate schools, or domestic and international universities relevant to target discipline. As a trial, we chose the courses relevant to environmental science in Hokkaido University, one of the 11 leading research universities in Japan. We extracted 240 syllabuses from 3,006 syllabuses of courses relevant to environmental science listed in an educational support system called ELMS, through the partial matching of Kankyo, a Japanese word of environment, in their course titles or keywords in all syllabuses. We clarified that the courses relevant to environmental science are provided by many graduate schools such as the Graduate Schools of Engineering, Agriculture, Science as well as the Graduate School of Environmental Science. We also found some critical issues when we used ELMS as an Institutional Research (IR) tool, such as duplicate /triplicate syllabuses for the same course, and duplicately/triplicately named courses for the same class due to inconsistency of their syllabuses and no policy for their naming convention of courses.