Abstract
Shikoku is an island of Japan. To create cooperative region where the people can share the awareness of “Shikoku is one community”, eight universities in Shikoku established e-Knowledge Consortium Shikoku (eK4) for realizing educational collaboration by e-Learning for the purpose of human resource development for Shikoku region. The consortium organizes e-Learning contents of the characteristic lectures of the eight universities in order to provide e-Learning courses among them. The e-Learning infrastructure of eK4 has typical features of distributed LMS and Shibboleth identification. eK4 has provided serval e-Learning courses based on credit transfer system since 2010. This chapter describes eK4 as a local university alliance and the educational activities in the viewpoint of providing e-Learning courses.
Keywords: Chipla-e project, Distributed LMS, e-Knowledge Consortium Shikoku, e-Learning, eK4, Human resource development, Local university alliance, Shibboleth, Shikoku, Study of Shikoku.