As we know, AI has found its uses in Corporate, Marketing, Sales, Research, Finance, Transportation and even Healthcare. Not only it saves work time but also improves human productivity. Now, it is also ready to change how we learn. Say Hi to AI-powered textbooks! The revolution is starting with South Korea!
Highlights:
- AI textbooks will be introduced in South Korea as soon as 2025.
- The programme has received mixed reception from teachers and parents.
- Big companies like LG and Samsung are already working on AI hardware for such a massive change.
What are AI Textbooks?
AI-powered textbooks are dynamic educational tools that use machine learning algorithms to provide personalized learning experiences.
In simple words, these textbooks can adapt to each student’s individual needs, learning style, pace and needs which helps to make learning more easy and effective. They can analyze students’ performance identify areas of improvement and provide instant feedback.
This personalization may help many students to cope with their educational difficulties and encourage them to study more.
AI Textbooks Programming starting in South Korea
The South Korean Government has decided that starting in March 2025, AI textbooks will be introduced for subjects such as Maths, English, Informatics and the Korean language. By 2028, they aim to introduce all the other subjects such as history, science and home economics.
This is what they said in the official announcement last year:
“By harnessing the power of AI digital textbooks in our communication and learning, we can achieve the vision of ‘personalized education for all. Teacher will play a crucial part in leveraging AI digital textbooks to facilitate holistic student growth by designing effective classroom education.”
Lee Ju-Ho, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education (2023)
These textbooks will offer customized learning content tailored to individual student data. Features such as screen captions, subtitles, and multi-linguistic translations will be available to cater to the needs of students and teachers in special education, as well as those with multicultural backgrounds.
They plan to introduce these AI-powered textbooks starting from third-grade, and fourth-grade elementary school students and middle-grade and high school freshmen.
Later on, all the students except first-grade and second-grade elementary students will learn all major subjects except activity-based ones like music, ethics, and physical education through these textbooks.
The elementary school first and second graders are excluded from this because they are deemed too young to be using digital devices.
Even Big Tech companies like LG and Samsung are also introducing new hardware and software for such a massive change. LG has already installed digital whiteboards connected to AI CLOi robots, that assist the teacher in the classroom, while Samsung is working on an AI Display screen that responds to the teacher’s voice.
However, note that paper textbooks are not going away in this programme.
Is Everyone Ready for such a massive change?
While we think that this is great for students, apparently some parents in Korea are not happy with this new development.
A petition was posted on the National Assembly’s online platform in May when the discussions were still going on about the introduction of AI textbooks.
The petition has urged the government to look at the overall development of the student and said that this decision may increase the addiction of children to their screens. This petition has already received support from 56,505 people between May and June. This shows that there is a significant backlash from the parent community regarding this discussion.
According to the Korean Herald, A nationwide survey of 2,247 public school teachers conducted by the Korean Federation of Teachers’ Associations in April found that 53.7% supported the introduction of AI-driven educational content.
Among them, 35.6% cited its potential benefits in individualized coaching, while 29.5% said it would promote self-directed learning. These statistics show that teachers are encouraging the use of AI textbooks.
One of the teachers has reportedly said that the real-time translation tools available in these books can help her fourth-grade non-Korean students learn the Korean language more effectively.
While AI has caused some problems before as well, with half the students doing assignments using AI tools, this is another hurdle that it has to pass.
Conclusion
Even though there are many advantages of AI-powered textbooks like making learning more enjoyable, there are various concerns expressed by parents. We need to wait and watch to know how the Korean experiment works out!
