South Korea to digitize all textbooks by 2015, provide tablets for school kids

South Korea’s Education Ministry has announced plans to trash the textbook tomes that weigh down the bags of students and replace them with digitized versions. Primary schools will be first, with their educational materials digitized by 2014, followed by secondary and high schools in 2015. The scheme, dubbed “Smart Education”, will allow students to read their materials on a variety of electronic devices, including smartphones, tablets, PCs, and internet-connected smart TVs. There’s no mention, however, of whether the project will also be rolled out to the students with the largest textbooks: undergraduates.

Some 2.2 trillion yon ($2 billion) will be spent on the project. The digitizing of educational materials will obviously consume some of that funding, but most of the money will probably be spent on the infrastructure for distributing the materials — i.e. tablets and smartphones for students. The South Korean government hasn’t revealed whether it will use a commodity tablet like the homegrown Samsung Galaxy Tab, or create a new device specifically for educational purposes. Given the planned cross-platform interoperability, though, it wouldn’t be surprising to see some kind of HTML5ish solution — and if that’s the case, then students will be able to use whatever tablet they like.

To back up this complete overhaul of the system the Education Ministry gave some interesting (but rather obvious?) facts about Korean students. Not only are they the most computer-literate students in the world, but according to a recent OECD report, they are also the most amenable to computer-based learning. “That’s why Korean students, who are already fully prepared for digital society, need a paradigm shift in education,” said an official from the Ministry.

The same OECD report, incidentally, showed that computer use at school didn’t actually have much of an impact on exam results. Computer use at home, on the other hand, created a much more marked improvement in results. The report goes on to suggest that computers should be further integrated into the teaching curriculum — and that’s exactly what Korea is now planning to do.