What Japan Thinks has just published the results of the goo survey on Opencourseware in Japan. The survey was conducted in December 2007 and covered 1,000 members of the goo Research monitor group and focused on materials available from universities within the Japan OpenCourseWare Consortium (the UNU plans to join JOCW in March 2008).

The respondents indicated that the main benefits of universities sharing their lectures where that universities would become more open (58%), it would be possible to compare courses (44%) and that this would raise interest in universities within society (43.5%).

Nearly 93% of those surveyed considered Opencourseware to be an extremely good or good thing, and a similar percentage indicated a desire to use the materials for either personal interest/education or as part of obtaining a qualification.

Educational materials that the respondents wanted to see most online where lecture notes/reference materials (70%) and lecture video recordings (57%). The fields of study that were of most interest were economics, information technology and business studies/marketing.

The main concerns regarding Opencourseware was that the lectures should be easy to understand (29%), should include a rich selection of courses (20%) and interesting lecture themes (19%).