Visit to Waseda University

Host: Prof Motoei Azuma

My first visit was to see Prof Motoei Azuma [ss] of Waseda University [»], one of the top two private universities in Japan. He spent a sabbatical in the Centre for Systems & Software Engineering at SBU (within SCISM) eight or nine years ago, so we already knew each other well. I also visited him in Japan a few years ago, while on vacation.

Context...

Prof Azuma is one of 14 professors [ss] within the Dept. of Industrial & Management Systems Engineering (IMSE) [ss/»], which is within the School of Science & Engineering [»]. IMSE is one of 15 departments [ss] within the School.

Students in IMSE study "mathematical technology, systems technology, information technology, and human-factors technology", so computing is not their main focus. There are three other departments within Waseda in which computing is also taught:
       » Dept. of Department of Electrical, Electronics & Computer Engineering
       » Dept. of Electronics, Information & Communication Engineering
       » Dept. of Information & Computer Science

There is little contact between the various schools, although students from different schools sometimes take joint optional specialist units. IMSE's annual student intake is roughly 130 undergraduates plus around 70 Masters students. Currently there are only two or three (?) PhD students in IMSE though - apparently it is difficult to attract suitable candidates.

Facilities...

Adjoining Professor Azuma's office is his laboratory [ss/»], which can accommodate roughly 15 students. Every Masters student occupies a seat in the laboratory of one or another of the professors, as do final year project students (?). The lab looked well equipped, with an LCD screen for each student. When I visited it was still the summer holidays, so no students were present. Prof Azuma told me that although there is technician support, several of the students are capable computer technicians and are happy to install new equipment and manage the network in exchange for payment.

I was also shown IMSE's award-winning suite of three networked teaching rooms. Four years ago they undertook a major revision of their courses and facilities, and as part of the re-organisation equipped three adjoining rooms with Ethernet connections for 150 machines. They didn't install any machines though. Instead, they required all incoming students to bring their own ethernet-ready laptops. Laptop computers are relatively affordable now (prices are generally a little lower in Japan than in the UK), but four years ago they must still have been pretty expensive. I couldn't imagine having such a policy at SBU - I'm sure our students would object very strongly to being required to spend so much of their own money on equipment. I don't know of any university in the UK that requires students to purchase machines, but Prof Azuma told me that it's quite a common policy in Japanese universities now. No doubt it will come to UK universities soon.

The award they received was in recognition not just of the facilities but also the fact that they had developed special software for the students to download and run on their machines. Students can also view on their machines the presentation slides that the lecturer is using. Since there are three rooms, only the students who are in the same room as the lecturer can see him (or, in principle, her). So there is a loudspeaker system to relay what is being said, and assistants (usually MSc students) in the other rooms imitate the lecturer by drawing the students' attention to the relevant parts of each slide using a pointing device as the lecture proceeds.

Using these facilities it is possible to hold not only lectures but also tutorial-style group-working exercises with up to 150 students in attendance simultaneously. The seats are arranged around tables, with eight (?) seats and network connections per table to allow for group working.

About the student intake...

I mentioned an article I had read (Myers, 1995-a) which stated that since high schools concentrate on preparing students to sit university entrance exams, and since those exams don't include any computing-related questions, there is generally very little in the way of computer education in schools. Prof Azuma agreed with this, saying that in his experience incoming students are often quite ignorant about computers, although a few are quite knowledgeable.

Prof Azuma also said that not all students need to take the entrance examination, and those who don't are free to concentrate instead on developing skills that will be of more use to them when they are in university. Waseda has two affiliated senior high schools from which students can enter the university without taking the entrance examinations. Certain other schools are able to nominate one student each. These students are assured of their place in October or November, while other students face entrance examinations in February/March. (The academic year in Japan starts in mid-April).

Almost all of the incoming students are aged between 18 and 20 (?) - either coming in straight from school or after one or two (?) years of re-taking the entrance exam. Around 6% or 7% of the students are foreign, and as foreigners they are exempt from taking the entrance exam. Most of these students are from other countries within Asia. They usually spend a year in Japan after finishing school in their home country in order to learn Japanese before embarking on their undergraduate course.

Roughly 60% (?) of the IMSE's graduates are subsequently offered a place on the Masters course. Most of them accept the offer. There is a subject-specific entrance examination which all other applicants must take.

Alumni...

Prof Azuma showed me IMSE's alumni website, and said that maintaining contact with ex-students is very important. He cited two separate recent examples of software artefacts that have been developed specifically to support groupwork-oriented student exercises. One was developed in collaboration with Hitachi and the other with NEC - in each case the principal industrial contact is an ex-student who is now a visiting lecturer within IMSE. These are non-trivial pieces of software, apparently developed over a three-year period in each case by a team of something like half a dozen people (working part-time). I queried the motives of Hitachi and NEC, but Prof Azuma said that the main incentive was simply the desire to help IMSE and its students. This struck me as another luxury I would never see at SBU!

Syllabus...

In developing a syllabus for his software engineering course, Prof Azuma said that he is increasingly looking to base his teaching on the guidelines issued by the IEEE - he is particularly interested in the new SWEBOK guidelines [»]. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, if they adhere to international guidelines then they are less likely to encounter any problems when their courses are (re)accredited. Secondly, he feels that a growing sense of internationalisation means that students in general are more keen on the idea that the education they receive should be comparable to the education they would have received had they studied in Europe or the USA. Prof Azuma said he also has his eye on the European Space for Higher Education initiative [»].

Web-based teaching materials...

I was interested to know the extent to which Prof Azuma and his colleagues use the web as a vehicle for the delivery of teaching materials. Prof Azuma showed me that his weekly lecture slides are posted in PDF format on the web (restricted access), but admitted that they were posted there by the school's webmaster who happens to be one of the postgraduate students based in his laboratory. He was not aware of any of the other professors doing a similar thing.

State of the Japanese software industry...

I had first met Prof Azuma in 1992 when I was involved in a study tour of Japanese software factories. He was the organiser. Since I knew that he is very knowledgeable about the Japanese software industry as a whole, I was interested to hear what he had to say about that too.

I showed him a quotation from an article (Ohba & Nagano, 1997) which implies that software factories are going out of fashion. I wondered whether I would see essentially the same things now if I visited Hitachi, Fujitsu etc. compared with my visit ten years ago. He suggested that things have indeed changed. In particular, the big systems companies no longer hire people to write programs. Instead they do the analysis/design and then subcontract the coding, either to an affiliated company or (increasingly) to a cheaper overseas software house. European and American companies often look to India for cheap software development, but for Japanese companies the more natural choice is China - mainly because they understand kanji characters.

I produced another quotation (from Barr & Tessler, 1995) which states that software in Japan has a lower status than it does in the USA, and that this has a detrimental effect in terms of attracting bright individuals and venture capital. Prof Azuma didn't agree with this at all. However, I observed that since the leading manufacturers are increasingly outsourcing their software development to save money this does seem to imply that coding (at least) is not such a highly valued skill.

Finally, Prof Azuma said that Japan's software exports are mostly games-related and systems software (i.e. software embedded into large scale engineered systems), while imports consist primarily of business-oriented applications software. Japan's software exports roughly match its software imports in terms of overall value.