EdReNe – Current state of educational repositories – national overview

Korean ICT initiatives in education and EDUNET were presented by Dr. Dae-Joon Hwang, Ex-President of KERIS, Republic of Korea. The following is a summary of his presentation.

Rapid changes in society and technology, Web 2.0, globalization etc. has lead to a paradigm shift in education in Korea. As a result of the changes the educational sector had to change and innovate itself. As one solution to this demand Korea chose to use ICT to drive innovation in Education.

Policies of ICT use in education have been pursued through three Master Plans from 1996 to the present in order to achieve the goals of Korean education, which is to realize education welfare, enhance quality of education, offer equal opportunities to education, and equip itself with world-class competitiveness.

Make a note of the fact that Korea started out with “how the future education should be”. The major issues in each Master Plan were:

• Master Plan 1 (1996-2000), the major issue was to establish the ICT environment – the infrastructure in the classroom.
• Master Plan 2 (2001-2005), the major issues were to “enhance the effect and quality of education” through ICT integration and realize “education welfare” through promotion of e-Learning. The projects include: Education Resources Sharing System, Teaching and Learning Center, and Cyber Home Learning System (“Cyber Home Learning system” is a nationwide e-learning system).
• Master Plan 3 (2006-present) focus on customized learning and world-class competitiveness in education. The projects include a u-Learning pilot project and the development of digital textbook to meet future demands of Korean education.

From 1996-present the ICT infrastructure has evolved in the following way:

Some of the major initiatives:

The trends and development of ICT in education in Korea is summarised in the following diagram presented by Dr. Dae-Joon Hwang (some of his comments can be found after the diagram).

• The red line: From the beginning a national bureau was organised to take full responsibility for national ICT in education strategy. The ICT infrastructure was established with public-private partnerships. The national institutes designated to spearhead ICT in education were KMEC and KERIS. A regional bureau of ICT in education was established to expand central and regional government collaboration. In 2001 a regional centre for ICT in education was established.
• The green line: First the PC’s and other hardware investments. Then the school network was completed. The e-Learning infrastructure was completed during master plan II. At the moment the focus is on expanding the u-Learning infrastructure.
• The blue line: CAI content on computer issues was available from the beginning. Educational content was expanded with multimedia functions during master plan II. To expand the use of educational content, a metadata standard became a critical aspect. The answer was KEM 2.0 - Korea’s Metadata standard (at the moment it is in version 3.0). In the u-Learning era, it is important to use digital textbook with self-directed learning content.
• The purple line: Korea started with computer education in schools and implemented teacher training. During master plan II, Korea initiated ICT model schools and nurtured ICT innovative teachers. The ICT innovative teachers played a critical role in training other teachers.
• The orange line: The educational portal service named EDUNET was established together with a school administrative system. NEIS (National Education Information System) is an integrated system designed to provide access to all educational information by connecting all elementary and secondary schools.

Teacher training has been an important issue during the implementation process. By now all teachers must complete 90 hours of training every 3rd year. The mandatory part includes an assessment (and it is difficult to keep the job with a bad result).

The teacher training strategy in Korea.

EDUNET is a national Knowledge Bank of educational resources that provides teachers and students (K12 – the Korean School system is 6-3-3 divided) with teaching-learning materials, consultations, and a community service. It is also the first (dates back to 1996) and the most popular integrated educational information portal for primary and secondary education in Korea (www.edunet.net). KERIS (Korea Education & Research Information Service) and the Ministry of Education are behind EDUNET.

This diagram shows the functional aspects of EDUNET.

In the following a few screens illustrate the user experience in one part of EDUNET.

Earthquakes – a learning resource example from EDUNET (all the content is in Korean).

DAEDO Elementary School, Seoul, Korea is connected to EDUNET via federated search

The detailed statistics on registered users and the educational resources can be found below. The one million educational resources are impressing. Dr. Dae-Joon Hwang told that 70 percent is based on SCORM (sequencing is fully supported). He added that they had experienced some problems with the 2004 version of SCORM.

EDUNET uses a Korean dialect of IEEE LOM metadata.

Statistics for EDUNET.

Another interesting aspect of EDUNET is the sharing process. A major part of the educational resources has been gathered in this way. As part of the process the quality is ensured. The process is illustrated by a few diagrams in the following.

The educational resources sharing process.

The quality assurance process.

The 300 verification officers: some are from schools, other from universities and local administration. They work part time.

It takes less than 3 months for a learning resource to pass through quality assurance, which is from the user to the national knowledge bank. To keep up with the number of resources submitted it could be necessary to have more persons working with quality assurance in the future.

The seven review points are:

• Are the selected data, title, and explanation in agreement?
• Are the attached images relevant to the applicable data?
• Is the data classification appropriate?
• Is the curriculum appropriate?
• Is the copyright information, including copyright agency and author, exact?
• Are the attached files downloadable?
• Do the downloaded files correspond to the applicable data?

The latest assessment (2007) places EDUNET as the most popular online service provider in Korea. The same assessment showed that teachers using EDUNET reduced the time for class preparation with 22 % (from 83.2 min. /day in average before using EDUNET to 64.9 min. /day).

The future challenges were summarised by Dr. Dae-Joon Hwang:

• Expanding educational resource sharing and distribution through, institutional, regional and cross boarder partnership.
  • Encourage sharing educational resources at home and abroad.
  • Facilitate development of educational resource based on open source.
• Service operation more adaptable to user participation.
  • Strengthen personalized and customized services for increased user satisfaction.
  • Reinforcing the UCC and building a quality control-based system by users.
• Management of Intellectual Property Right.
  • Continuous education to change awareness to IPR and copyright in schools.
  • Increase awareness to multiculturalism: localization.
  • Collaboration in addressing interoperability.