Coronavirus crisis shows Japan lagging in online education

Schools around the world have been forced to close their doors during the coronavirus pandemic, keeping an estimated 1.5 billion students out of classrooms for weeks or even months. In many countries, educators have begun offering lessons online, but Japan's public schools have been slow to adopt that model.

A survey by the education ministry in mid-April shows how little Japanese public schools have adapted. It found that only 5% of local governing bodies across the country planned online classes while schools were shut due to the pandemic. In contrast, 100% of them planned home study with textbooks or printed materials.

Ishido Nanako, professor at Keio University's Graduate School of Media Design, says Japan's schools have never shown much enthusiasm for digital education, which means they were ill-prepared to adapt to the coronavirus crisis. People are too worried about egalitarianism. That's one of the major reasons we're still sticking to the conventional education style in which students sit passively in classrooms with pencils and notebooks," she says. "This hasn't changed for over a century, and Japan has fallen behind the rest of the world in terms of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) in education."

Data from the OECD's 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) illustrates how slow Japan has been to introduce ICT into education. They asked 15-year-old students how much times they spent using digital devices during classroom lessons in a typical school week. In Japan, 89% said they never or hardly ever use them in math classes, and 75.9% gave that answer for science lessons. Both figures are the lowest among all OECD members. And it's a similar picture outside of the classroom. Only 3% said they do homework on a computer. The average for OECD members was 20%.