Case Study: Hokkaido University slashes course‑prep time and expands global access with Microsoft Azure

Faculty of Engineering at Hokkaido University uses the cloud to improve online learning

Hokkaido University’s Faculty of Engineering created the Center for Engineering Education Development (CEED) to help students study abroad without delaying graduation by providing Moodle-based video lectures and remote coursework. Running the system on campus servers limited capacity (only half of needed video storage), required nearly two weeks to transcribe and prepare a course, caused mobile compatibility issues, and raised security concerns about exposing on-premises systems to off-campus access.

Working with partner Kodama Research Institute, CEED migrated its e-learning platform to Microsoft Azure using Azure Media Services, Virtual Machines, Cognitive Services, and Translator to automate encoding, speech-to-text, and translation. The move cut video encoding from six hours to two and total course preparation from more than 13 days to about two hours, enabled virtually unlimited video scalability and device-optimized delivery, added analytics for usage insights, and is projected to halve human and infrastructure costs over five years.

Hokkaido University

Hironori Kakui

Technician