June 2014
Naoki Kobayashi / Yumiko Hara
The NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute is developing “TV Programs e-Text System”—an Internet video distribution system of selected broadcast programs—in order to utilize TV contents stored in the NHK Archives in university education. This is the third reports of the attempts of experimental courses at university. The last two articles presented a course on “modern history of Okinawa” at Waseda University in the FY 2012. This latest two-part article features a course on “history of Minamata disease incident” conducted at Hosei University in the FY 2013, with the first part focusing on the structure of the course and profiles of students reported by Yumiko Hara (Media Research, NHK BCRI) and the second part on the purpose of the course design and the reactions of the students by Naoki Kobayashi (Professor, Hosei University) who lectured the course. The system used for the course was equipped with eleven TV titles that students were requested to watch prior to each lecture and four titles used as reference. Students were able to access to these programs via personal computers or mobile devices at home and at university during the course. They were instructed to watch a selected title before each lecture and write a short report as assignment, based on which the lecture was developed. After the completion of the course, although only 67 out of 227 students who registered to the course were able to earn credit, those who tackled each assignment in a serious manner achieved satisfactory results. In this regard, we can assess that Prof. Kobayashi’s aim of delivering a course on “the history of Minamata disease incident as a history of television” as “an attempt to study the postwar history of Japan through the history Minamata disease incident” was fulfilled.