Abstract:

The threat of natural disasters such as torrential rain and massive flood is increasing year by year. A rainy season front that stalled from late June to early July 2021 brought record-breaking rainfall to western Japan and the Kanto Region. The torrential rains opened 283 evacuation centers for 55,000 people living in the affected areas. In the past few years, heavy rainfall disasters have occurred every year in Japan. Special rainfall warnings, which are issued once every few decades, are issued every year. In the Great East Japan Earthquake that occurred in 2011, more than 20,000 victims continued to live in evacuation centers at 73 evacuation centers even seven months after the disaster. In natural disasters caused by climate change and disasters caused by huge earthquakes and tsunamis, it is inevitable that the evacuation period will be prolonged.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which began at the end of 2019, is still spreading in repeated waves as of 2022. The monkeypox over outbreak has been declared a global health emergency by the World Health Organization on July 23, 2022. An infectious explosion such as a pandemic limits human contact for an extended period of time. This limitation cannot be avoided even in the case of living in an evacuation life during a disaster such as a torrential rain or earthquake. The disaster has cut off the cell phone communication network, and the information and communication environment in evacuation centers is generally inadequate at the time of the disaster. Many people who are evacuated must share the temporary Wi-Fi set up at the evacuation center. However, evacuees cannot live in close proximity to each other in order to prevent infectious diseases.

Due to changes in the phase of evacuation and the prolonged evacuation life, the proportion of daily life such as resuming studying in the evacuation life gradually increases. This "daily life under the non-daily life" will continue until they leave the evacuation center. As daily life resumes, learning activities also resume. The current e-learning environment is built on the premise of a high-speed and low-latency communication environment that allows for constant communication. Continuing e-learning in an inadequate communication environment, such as a evacuation center is difficult. It is also difficult for learners to study in close proximity to each other cause of prevent infectious diseases.

In this study, we designed a distributed asynchronous learning support framework for operation in complex disaster situations. We implement a feature-limited LMS service using a power-saving IoT device. This IoT device is equipped with Wi-Fi capabilities and behaves as an access point for a limited number of users. The IoT device will function as an edge device that integrates a limited function version of the LMS and a communication status monitor. The device creates a learning support environment that covers a wide area within the evacuation center by supporting mesh Wi-Fi functionality. We aim to support the continuous use of e-learning in “daily life under the non-daily life” from the middle to the end of evacuation shelter life. Additionally, we explain how to preserve learning history on the proposed asynchronous learning assistance framework, and it is explained the experimental results of the execution environment implemented as a prototype, and effectiveness.

Keywords:

e-learning, disaster reduction for learners, edge computing, continuation of learning.