About 40 percent of Japan's public and private universities and colleges had introduced e-learning systems by the end of the 2006 academic year, underlining a rapid increase in the number of institutions that are tapping into electronic education, the National Institute of Multimedia Education said in a recent report.

Proponents say e-learning enables schools to attract working people, who have less free time than full-time students. However, the schools themselves are responsible for shouldering the costs of developing the necessary infrastructure and teaching materials.

By the end of the 2006 academic year in March, 298 universities and colleges, both public and private, had introduced e-learning, providing education via personal computers, hand-held devices and the Internet — more than double the 129 institutions that provided e-learning in academic 2002, according to the survey.