What makes South Korea a major testbed for global edtech?

South Korea’s high-speed internet, strong technology companies and reputation for early adoption of technologies – combined with one of the world’s largest proportions of teenagers entering higher education and huge household spending on out-of-school classes – has made it a major testbed for educational technology start-ups wanting a springboard to global markets.

It is also part of a growing trend of edtech start-up companies from Asia going global and gaining ground in the West, diluting the predominance of Western edtech.

So heard a global edtech summit held in San Diego, California, this week and organised by Arizona State University (ASU) and the Global Silicon Valley (GSV) investment platform.

South Korea was described as a “model test lab environment” that can provide “superfast” and sophisticated feedback on new edtech products that can be rolled out globally, by David Yi, CEO of Riiid Labs in Silicon Valley California – part of Riiid in South Korea. He was moderating a panel on South Korea as an edtech testbed at the ASU-GSV summit, held from 9-11 August.

In particular, the capital, Seoul, “is highly wired and the education frenzy is pretty high – sometimes parents know more than content developers”, he told University World News. “Parents are used to a high-quality UI [user interface] and UX [user experience].”

“A lot of them [parents] studied abroad in the United Kingdom or the United States or Australia and have come back. So you have a population of folks who are keenly aware of what the global standard of education is, and are highly accustomed to the best of the best technology.”

Japan is similar to Korea, according to Yi, but the number of Japanese students who study abroad is “remarkably lower”, as is the number of Japanese parents who are highly aware. “Testing for a product that aims to be rolled out globally cannot be conducted at the same scale, as not many Japanese are as proficient in English.”

Another big edtech start-up country is China, which is also strongly education oriented and with cities such as Beijing and Shanghai having good, fast internet. But China, itself, is a huge internal market.

“As a testbed for a global edtech market, you can’t so easily take it out of China and apply it. You can try, but it is hard because it is optimised for China and you have very little incentive to tweak it for the global market,” Yi said, referring to huge profits that can be made within China itself.

Education-oriented society

Enuma is an edtech start-up designing autonomous early learning programmes for children, including those with special needs, to become independent learners.

“Although we’re headquartered in the US, our subsidiary in Korea is actually the main hub of the development and the design,” Eugine Chung, Enuma’s chief operating officer, told the ASU-GSV summit.

Korean parents are used to spending a high proportion of household income on supplementary education due to the country’s exam pressure and the prevalence of private after-hours cram schools for almost 50 years, she told University World News.

“Korean parents, themselves, grew up using early education products – which were then paper-based. And they are also used to using digital products. They ask extremely advanced questions which help to improve the products – they set a very high bar.”

“What we find is that talent in Korea, whether it’s an engineer or a designer or a systems designer, they are all past users of supplementary early education, so we find the whole product development and design process to be really easy,” she said.

“We feel that, if we succeed in the Korean market, we get a big stamp of approval.”

Speakers at the ASU-GSV session pointed to Korea as a major incubator for computer games and an eSports hub, as well as the recent popularity of Korean culture – such as K-pop and Korean television dramas and film, especially in Southeast Asia – as providing the basis for developing engaging edtech.

The Southeast Asian region is particularly open to Korean culture, said Chung. “We feel that anything that succeeds in Korea would be easier to scale up in Southeast Asia. Often, people think the Korean market is too small, but the way we see it is that it is Korea and the whole Southeast Asian market.”

While Korea is a good testbed, products are also designed for the emerging markets with less-technology-savvy users and weaker infrastructure. Enuma’s Kitkit School was developed in Swahili and field-tested in Tanzania. The next-generation product, Enuma School was rolled out as Sekolah Enuma in Indonesia.

Improving learning engagement through edtech

Youjin Choi, chief operating officer and co-founder of the interactive learning engagement platform CLASSUM, noted that tech-savvy Koreans are early adapters of technology compared to other countries.

“Their expectation of how an app should work is really high, they’re very sophisticated users,” she said, noting that South Korea has one of the world’s fastest internet speeds. “In Korea we can get that product tested and we get feedback really quickly.”

Choi used her alma mater, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology or KAIST as the testbed for their immensely successful learning management platform for schools and higher education, which is now also being rolled out in Japan, the United States, Singapore and Indonesia, with interest shown from 24 other countries.

“It has just grown organically without any publicity or PR,” she noted, adding that the COVID-19 pandemic has sparked huge interest in online learning “and anything that can improve communication and student engagement”.

Korea was an important testbed, in particular, as KAIST teaches in English and has many international students. “We knew that, as the students in our school are happy about the product, probably the rest of the world will be okay with it,” Choi said.

“At KAIST the students are in engineering and in technology so they would read our code as well and give us feedback,” Choi told University World News.

“And there were teachers at KAIST who have a background in HCI – human-computer interaction. So they already know how people interact with an app and how that would increase engagement or learning ability of students, but also vice versa – how it could help teachers to gain a better understanding of their students, as well.”

CLASSUM started as a communication tool for students to talk to their peers and also their teachers in a way similar to existing social media. “Now, after four years, we have expanded to becoming more of a learning management system where students and teachers can actually learn and teach and communicate,” she explained.

“It started in a way that was very different from other LMS [learning management systems]. A lot of them were developed by teachers, so they focus on the management portion rather than understanding what students want,” she said.

“We already know that communication and engagement are a crucial part of learning. But, to be frank, universities and schools don’t act on it.”

A lot of LMS apps are software-heavy and slow. “Students have a hard time finding where everything is. So that’s why we incorporated a lot of the social media aspect of it, things that students automatically know and use.

“We wanted something very quick, intuitive, fast and alive,” she added.

One of the universities in Korea that was an early user of the CLASSUM system as its own LMS was a specialist school of music, literature and art. “They used our product for their vocal lessons, for the violin lessons. So that was very interesting,” Choi said.

AI-powered learning technologies

Part of the CLASSUM system has already been patented. The behavioural data from the platform’s use has led to the development of an online AI-driven teaching assistant “to help students to engage with each other more, because, right now during the pandemic, they’re not seeing each other, so they’re not engaging,” Choi said, pointing to student dissatisfaction with online university classes and with general university communication during the pandemic.

“We wanted a ‘Siri’-type of way for students to engage with someone who has similar questions or to be able to answer each other,” she said, referring to the virtual assistant developed by Apple.

“Classes are taught numerous times by the same teachers. As the years go by, students ask the same questions over and over again. We wanted to create a system where students could get an answer from the previous students that were taught in the same class. Often, students just don’t know whom to talk to.”

Yi’s Riiid labs is also rolling out AI-powered edtech testing which helps improve student engagement in test preparation apps for standardised tests such as US SATS or global English proficiency tests.

“The AI knows when you’re going to quit, so it has various intervention methods and incentives to keep you on. Basically, what Netflix or Amazon does to keep you shopping. The AI increases screen time which is a good thing for learners.”

Riiid’s AI was tested in Korea on takers of the TOEIC test, an English-language proficiency test for professionals run by US-based education company ETS, which has a large number of takers in the country.

“We are able to predict their TOEIC score with 90% accuracy. Students were surprised; it’s like talking to a fortune-teller, right? And then it’s also giving them feedback on how to study.”

“People were spending per week on average 3.5 hours studying on our app, which means it’s highly engaging,” said Yi. There are three million users of the Riiid AI through various tests.

“It not only makes for a better learning and testing experience, but it promises a more holistic measurement, not just measuring a person’s academic skills but also measuring a person’s learning acceleration, their ability to [achieve] mastery.

“As soon as we finished testing it, we expanded to other countries outside Korea, like Vietnam, and now in the United States and Brazil and the Middle East,” Yi said.