By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter

The government plans to have digital devices replace books and blackboards in schools, a transition it claims will open a new chapter in education. However, the ambitious e-learning initiative appears to have been derailed from the start, with a problem that is less about technology than it is with content.

The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology has spent 300 billion won (about $255 million) to install "electronic blackboards," or interactive monitors for showing electronic content, in 256 middle and high schools across the country.

However, these neat screens don't see much use in classrooms, as the e-book content to replace printed textbooks is non-existent.

Critics ridicule the government for putting the cart before the horse, spending lavish money on the e-learning equipment when there has been little progress in plans to convert state-authorized textbooks into digital formats.

The digital blackboards, on 65-inch liquid crystal display (LCD) panels or bigger, certainly aren't cheap as they often come with price tags in the range of several hundreds of millions of won. According to the ministry, 300 million to 1.5 billion won was spent at each school to install the blackboards and related devices.

"With no e-books to show, teachers don't have any real use for the electronic blackboards at all. They are just lying there or being used as complementary tools to the chalkboard," said Park Jung-min, a teacher at a high school in Siheung, Gyeonggi Province.

"We don't know when the e-books are coming, and how much they will replace the textbooks we currently use when they do. There have been no changes to the current law that requires all state-authorized school textbooks be provided only in print, and this whole electronic blackboard thing so far looks just like an expensive public relations (PR) sideshow."

Since converting a whole school textbook into digital content and using it in classrooms would be considered illegal under current rules, teachers can only consider taking excerpts from the books and use them in e-book format, Park said.

And most of the time, an e-book format merely refers to scanned image files of printed paper.

"You can get the pages scanned, but it would be hard to say that would add anything to the communication between teachers and students," Park said.

There is also criticism on the technology side of the project as well, as the Ministry of Education is struggling to explain why it failed to provide guidelines to control the brightness of the screens and other safety measures.

"The regional educational authorities, not the ministry, have the full rights over controlling the actual operation of the electronic blackboards and other e-learning equipment," an education policymaker said.

"Different schools have different situations, and it is hard for us to tell them to do things a certain way."

While the government has managed to get electronic blackboards into the classrooms, distributing the e-book readers seem to be a more complicated problem.

The government plans to spend 18 billion won to establish e-book infrastructures in 110 schools in rural communities around the country, where the digital transition will first be tested.

However, there are concerns that the project could be derailed. The consortium that the government picked to provide the e-book readers, led by LG Dacom, LG Telecom's fixed-line telephony unit, and American computer giant Hewlett Packard (HP), is showing signs of bailing.

More than 9,800 e-book devices are required for the project, but the government insists it won't spend more than 1.1 million won for each. However, LG Dacom and HP are finding it hard to keep the price of the device below 1.3 million won.

The conflict over prices has the consortium, despite being selected as the preferred bidder, reluctant to ink a contract, and industry sources say that there is a real possibility that the deal could fall through.

thkim@koreatimes.co.kr