International distance education at CRADLE and natural disasters

CRADLE (Center for Research and Development of Educational Technology), Tokyo Tech (Tokyo Institute of Technology) has been conducting international distance education activities since 2002 using both satellite and Internet. Formal graduate level courses have been exchanged with partner institutions in Thailand and the Philippines. We also have experimental lecture exchange. In many cases the network bandwidth is limited to several hundred kbps to several Mbps, but we are trying to test HD (High-Definition) video transmission with about 30Mbps when the situations allow. It is found that using HD video transmission, presence, immediacy, and satisfaction increase. We experienced several severe natural disasters during the last decade of our project. We report how those natural disasters affected our distance education activities, and how we overcame them.