Building new research networks in Korea As follows, a brief summary of the key meetings that Mg. Mariana Montaldo, Head of Department at Ceibal and Dr. Cristóbal Cobo, Director of the Center for Research - Ceibal th Foundation had during their visit in Korea from the 14th to the 18 of September. The activities started with a one-day-visit at the KERIS’ offices. Keris stands for Korea Education and Research Information Services and it is located in the city of Daegu 2 hours away by the speed train from Seoul. At Keris they met its President, Lim Sungbin, as well as Dr. Sohn Byeonggil, Director of Global Policy Research Center, and Boseon Kim Associate Research Fellow. The delegation had the chance to learn from different initiatives promoted by Keris like the education data center of all the education related with education (hosted physically in their facilities), the KOCW for Korean Higher Education, home cyber-schooling, among other information management systems already implanted. During the conversation with staff from KERIS they had the chance to explore the Classroom of the Future and to better understand the cyber-school-learning projects currently implemented in Korea. The delegation also shared some lessons learned and relevant information about IntegreaTE, the Cyber Home Learning Pilot Project run in Uruguay last year.
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At the Classroom of the Future in the Korea Education and Research Information Services (KERIS). During the second day the Uruguayan team attended the e-Learning Korea summit, opened by Larry Johnson, chairperson of the world of the renowned “Horizon Report”. During this national summit they gave the lecture entitled “How to increase the completion rate in MOOCs?: Lessons learned from the Uruguay experience”.
Mariana Montaldo presenting the Mooc’s experience in Uruguay. The event was a remarkable opportunity to learn about the state-of-the-art in education in technology in Korea and overseas. Some presentations discussed the usefulness of Flipped Classroom among other topics in #EdTech. The event assigned special attention to research in the field of Learning Analytics (LA). Among the more remarkable talk can be highlighted the National Framework for Educational Data Standards presented by Prof. Ilju Rha from the Department of Education (College of Education) at the Seoul National University as well as the comprehensive LA overview presented by Prof. Mi-Lee Ahn from the Hanyang University. Yong Chan Jung (from the Korea Information Society Development Institute) also presented thoughtful ideas during his intervention. After conversations with them, the experts refereed were extremely open to enable future collaborations with Plan Ceibal and Ceibal Foundation.
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Slide (excerpt) from Dr.Yong Chan Jung’s presentation, Director of ICT Statistics Analysis center, Korea Information Society Development Institute.
Prof. Ilju Rha from the Department of Education (College of Education) at the Seoul National University After the conference the delegation visited the IT showcase where they explored new educational technologies and connected with some potential providers. The Uruguayan delegation also had a follow up meeting with Robert Kim, CEO of Iportfolio, a digital book creator and distribution platform. Contacts had been previously initiated and he presented updates and new releases of the tool for next year.
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The third day the Uruguayan team had a morning visit to the Korean Education Development institute (KEDI), which host 500 researchers in education organized in 5 areas (policies, national statistics in education, schools support and monitoring, higher education and a global education research division). The meeting was lead by Dr Ju Hur, director of the global education division) and Su-Jin Choi and Hoonho Kim, both associate researchers from the same division.
Picture with Dr Ju Hur, director of the global education division at the Korean Education Development institute (KEDI) During the afternoon the visitors met the Director of the Big Data Institute at the Seoul National University, Dr. Sang Kyun, professor of electrical and computer engineering and Dr. Ho-Young Kim, Head of the Division of Scientific and Technological Applications. This is a national leading multi-disciplinary institute in the field of Big Data and large-scale data processing. The scholars were extremely interested in pursuing academic collaboration in Big Data and LA in the context of future partnerships between the Korea and the Uruguay governments.
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Joint by the Director of the Big Data Institute at the Seoul National University, Dr. Sang Kyun, professor of electrical and computer engineering and Dr. Ho-Young Kim, Head of the Division of Scientific and Technological Applications. The last day, there was the opportunity to meet the vice-president from KICE (which stands for Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation), a public institution which host over 180 PhD officers conducting research in content, learning and evaluation. This was a especially fruitful conversation with Dr. Nan-Sim, vice-president of the institution, and a working meeting analysing commonalities and differences between the Korea and Uruguay educational systems. Then Dr. Taejoon Park research fellow from the Center for Global Education as well as with Dr. Soojin Kim from the Division of Educational evaluation participated in the exchange of perspectives. Then it was shared a remarkable fact: In Korea to become a teacher is the most desired job among girls and boys and this trend is consistent throughout students from middle and high school. The visit to Korea open an opportunity to meet Miss Andrea Bais, Consul at the Embassy of the Oriental Republic of Uruguay in Seoul who offered all the possible support for future collaborations. The final meeting of the visit was at the Hanyang University with Dr. Dongsik Kim, Chairperson of the Department of Educational Technology. Dr. Kim (who works in the same department of the previously mentioned Prof. Mi-Lee Ahn) and he expressed his interested in participating in any future multi-cultural study on education and technology between the Hanyang University and Fundación Ceibal.
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Dr. Dongsik Kim, Chairperson of the Department of Educational Technology from the Hanyang University. As an overall, it was remarkable experience of academic and institutional exchange. It opened clear opportunities of collaboration, knowledge exchange, and participation in future forums of common interest opening a number of possibilities for possible funding and or academics partnerships. Now the next steps are about to be taken.
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