21st century teaching

By Xinghui Guo | 26 October 2011 | Permanent link | 1 comment

Earlier this year when I first heard of South Korea’s plans to turn all textbooks digital and cloud-based from my friends at Korea Education and Research Information Service (KERIS), I remember being awed by the ambition in the project.

Moreover, I was a bit sceptical—at FutureGov, we have witnessed many ambitious projects which fail to achieve their ambitions because of the huge challenges they constantly face.

For the past few weeks I’ve been in regular contact with KERIS on their SMART Education strategy—where the cloud plans stem from—and it seems like South Korea is at the top of its education game.

While there have been initiatives to use certain technologies in a better way, these projects are often silo-ed in schools, faculties or classrooms. By creating a nationwide strategy after looking at the best practices worldwide, Korea is not only harnessing international knowledge, the country is also making sure that no one gets left out.

Lacking the right infrastructure to use cloud in classrooms? Teachers aren’t ICT-inclined? Not sure how to convert your teaching and learning materials to a digital platform? The strategy has identified all these challenges and drawn measures to tackle each of them: teachers will be trained; guidelines around textbooks will be formed; created learning material will be shared; and network infrastructure in all schools will be bumped up for the cloud starting next year.

All these require investments from the government, but judging from Korea’s past commitment to creating an information society, I am quite optimistic about their plans.

Not only that, pedagogy itself will see a shift: the ‘smart’ in SMART Education stands for self-directed, motivated, adaptive, resource-free and technology-embedded.

It is interesting to see such direction given on a uniform and national level while uneven developments remain a challenge for schools, faculties and classrooms in many countries around the region. Covering developments of education transformation in the region, I’ve heard a lot about getting learning management systems up and running, but equally on transforming education with engaging devices such as the smartphones that many students now carry.

Each country has visions and masterplans for education—but perhaps facing the great technological shift, it is time for government to be bolder, and more radical.

I’ll be following up with KERIS on the strategy—while being envious about what Korean students will be having in 2015 (which I did not have when I was a student 5 years ago)! So please expect fuller coverage of how Korea plans to make this strategy work and how much they have spent on it in an upcoming issue of FutureGov Asia Pacific. There will surely be some lessons that you will find useful.

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