Dankook Univ. looks to pandemic for growth

President of Dankook University Kim Soo-bok speaks during an interview with The Korea Times at his office in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, June 15. Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk

By Kim Se-jeong

In 1974, Kim Soo-bok was a freshman at Dankook University's Korean language department.

In his second year of study, he won an award for a poem he wrote and started his life as a poet.

In 1985, he joined the school faculty and from 2004 he took a management position at the school.

After serving as dean at the College of Liberal Arts and for Academic Affairs, he became vice president of the university's Cheonan campus in 2017.

And on Aug. 26 last year, he was sworn in as Dankook's president, becoming the first alumni to take office in the school's 73-year history.

Kim had a vision for his presidency of nurturing and empowering students by giving them the freedom to choose what they want to study regardless of their initial fields and integrating technologies to achieve this goal. He utilized the "Digital Creative Campus," project as a means to achieve his ambitious goal.

In October last year, he visited Arizona State University which is regarded as a frontrunner in digital education in an attempt to find benchmarks and cooperation.

Then, came the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We, as a school, were developing new ways of giving lectures, and the pandemic gave us the opportunity to test what we'd been developing," Kim said during a recent interview with The Korea Times.

As the university remained closed, the school organized an online welcoming ceremony for new freshmen and streamed it live on YouTube. During the ceremony, Kim took questions from student body representatives about the upcoming school year in the pandemic.

Around 5,000 lectures were recorded and posted as files online ― professors recorded these themselves and posted them on the school website for all students.

To adapt to the online education, Dankook expanded its server by 40 terabytes and made other technical improvements to make the school system more accessible.

"The first three weeks were very hectic. Teachers needed time to use the tools and deliver the lectures," Kim said adding that "It was not easy to make new syllabuses, record lectures and edit them. I have a big appreciation for the professors."

"After three weeks, students began to show satisfaction. It was a big relief that things began moving without any big problems. It was important for us to keep the students' rights to learn amid the pandemic and we were trying to see what we could do to protect those rights," Kim said.

Yet, not all students were happy with the online lectures and some demanded their tuition back.

Asked about the tuition refund, President Kim only said representatives from the school and the student body were in close communication.

His comments came only a few hours after the Konkuk University in Seoul announced it would give a partial tuition refund, triggering another nationwide debate among universities and the government.

"Every university has a different financial condition and so a solution for each school should be different. Discussions are under way. It's too early to say what we will do," Kim said.

In 2007, Dankook moved its Seoul campus to the current location in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province. With the new land more than double the size of the Seoul campus, the school invested in modernizing facilities equipping them with cutting-edge technologies.

The president said the pandemic is bringing in sweeping changes to Korea's higher education and Dankook is adapting fast to these.

This summer, the school will outfit 30 classrooms with devices that will enable professors to record videos and edit the content much more easily than now.

"The pandemic taught us that conventional teaching in a room with a group of students doesn't work anymore," Kim said.

The school is also looking forward to integrating its chatbot, DanAI, into student's academic decision-making.

Invented four years ago, DanAI was put online last year.

"The chatbot is like an advisor. For example, if a student majoring in Korean language wants to become a journalist, DanAI can advise them with information on courses he (she) can take at Dankook and help make an academic schedule for them for the entire four years. Also, DanAI can answer simpler questions about scholarship opportunities and extra-curricular activities that suit the person," the president said.

Founded in 1947, Dankook was the nation's first private four-year higher education institute since independence in 1945.

Among 25,000 enrolled students, the number of international students accounts for 2,000.

In the beginning of the pandemic in Korea, 163 Chinese students staying in quarantine collected donations of 3.3 million won and sent it to the Daegu Metropolitan Government.

"It was when there was a heated debate over banning Chinese people from entering Korea. I can say for sure what the Chinese students did contributed to alleviating tension between Korean and Chinese nationals at the time," Kim said. "In response, we received almost 4,000 masks from Shandong University of Arts and other institutions in China," the president said.