LEARNING FOR WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT

Expansion of Corporate e-Learning

In Korea, the development of e-Learning is mainly centered around educational training within corporations. Accordingly, e-Learning, which is related to job training, tends to focus mainly on corporate educational training.

With the amount of money that 1,000 Korean companies invested in employee education approaching the vast sum of 2.3 hundred million dollars in 1999, corporations are naturally looking for ways to lower their educational expenses and raise the effectiveness of their educational training

programs. E-Learning has emerged as one of the solutions to their problem.

Of course, although off-line education based on traditional methods is expected to remain the main form of education, the demand for corporate education using e-Learning is expected to steadily increase.

<Table 7-3> Size of Korea’s Corporate e-Learning Market

(Unit: one hundred thousand dollars, %)

Category 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005

Total Corporate Education Mkt. 25,323 27,095 28,992 31,021 33,193 Corporate e-Learning Market 3,494 5,771 7,973 9,958 11,651

Percentage 13.8 21.3 27.5 32.1 35.1

Source: Korea Employment Information Center, unpublished data, 2005.

Growth in the Size of Corporate e-Learning

The growth levels of corporate e-Learning, including the size and share of corporate education training devoted to corporate e-Learning, are as follows.

The basic data is drawn from the statistical information provided by the Ministry of Labor and the Korea Employment Information Center. At present, corporate educational training is heavily dependent on the Employment Insurance Fund. E-Learning is no exception. Accordingly, we can get a better sense of the present condition of e-Learning as well its rate of growth by examining the record of support provided by the Ministry of Labor for vocational development and training. First of all, when we look at the size, percentage, and participation rate of e-Learning within corporations, we can see its rapid growth and expansion. From the time that the Ministry of Labor’s Internet correspondence training system was put into place from 1999 to the present, the number of corporations and workers, who have taken part in Internet correspondence training, has rapidly increased. The number of institutes designated as Internet correspondence training institutes has also rapidly increased from 7 in 1998 to 16 in 1999, 51 in 2000, and 110 in 2001. In other words, from 1999 to 2001, the number of institutes that were approved as designated Internet correspondence training institutes increased approximately 6.9 times. This figure, which rapidly increased until 2001, decreased for the first time in that year. This decrease

can be attributed to the fact that a quality control system, in terms of approving and designating the institutes, began to be put into effect, with the full servicing and maintenance of Internet correspondence systems, in 2002.

The trend of continuous growth appears to have stalled with the introduction of various regulations for Internet correspondence training-designated institutes, including an evaluation system for Internet contents.

Nonetheless, at the present time (2004), the number of institutes using Internet correspondence training remains high, at 109. Moreover, the number of people taking part in Internet correspondence training shows a continuously increasing trend despite the decrease in the number of participating institutes. In 2004, the number of participants in Internet correspondence training programs doubled from 2001, when the number of participants had also shown a rapid increase.

Growing Support for Corporate e-Learning

As we can see in <Table 7-4>, the number of workers who participated in Internet training supported by the Ministry of Labor increased approximately 40.9 times from 19,653 trainees in 1999 to 804,241 trainees in 2004. Looking at the proportion of Internet correspondence training to total training (off-line, on-the-job, and correspondence training) supported by the Ministry of Labor in terms of the percentage of trainees, we see a similarly high growth rate. In contrast to only 2.5% of the total number of trainees who participated in Internet correspondence training in 1999, the figure was 41.4% in 2004, or more than one third of the total number of trainees.

<Table 7-4> The Number of Corporations and Trainees Participating in e-Learning (Unit: number, person, %) Year Internet correspondence

Training Institutions

Internet correspondence Trainees (A)

Total number of

Trainees (B) (A/B)×100

1999 16 19,653 781,408 2.5

2000 51 137,712 1,220,334 11.3

2001 110 406,159 1,555,402 26.1

2002 93 571,006 1,687,825 33.8

2003 105 523,577 1,532,993 34.2

2004 109 804,241 1,943,475 41.4

Source: Korea Employment Information Center, unpublished data, 2005.

The same can be said for the amount of funds used to support the job development and training of current workers. While funds for off-line training increased 2.1 times between 1999 and 2000, 1.2 times between 2000 and 2001, and 0.9 times between 2001 and 2002, the funds for Internet correspondence training showed relatively high rates of growth, increasing 7.1 times, 2.0 times, and 1.2 times during the same periods.

The share of total training taken up by off-line training showed a continuous decrease each year compared to the rapid growth of Internet correspondence training. Internet correspondence training, which used to receive 2.8% of the total support funds in 1999, received 29.5% of the total funds in 2004. When we look at the actual amount of money received, using 2002 as the base year, Internet correspondence training received approximately 56.6 billion won of the total budget of 191.9 billion won.

<Table 7-5> Trends in Changes in Training Fee Support by Year

(Unit: %)

Category 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004

Number of

Trainees ^{95.5 86.1 76.7 69.6 54.6 47.4} Off-line Training

Amount of

Support Funds ^{96.4 89.6 83.2 78.8 75.5 70.4} Number of

Trainees ^{0.3 0.7 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1} On-the-job

Training Amount of

Support Funds ^{0.8 0.8 0.2 1.1 0.1 0.1} Number of

Trainees ^{4.2 13.2 23.2 30.3 45.3 52.5} Communication

Training Amount of

Support Funds ^{2.8 9.6 16.6 20.1 24.4 29.5} Number of

Trainees ^{100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0} Total

Amount of

Support Funds ^{100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0} Source: Korea Employment Information Center, unpublished data, 2005.

Major Issues in e-Learning

As we have so far seen, ‘Internet correspondence training’ has had a positive influence in promoting the growth of e-Learning within corporations. This development can also be evaluated as an important result of the Internet correspondence training policy. However, despite the notable

success in promoting corporate e-Learning, there are still problems within the existing Internet correspondence training system that have to be addressed. These problems within corporate e-Learning, however, cannot be said to originate in the Internet correspondence training system itself. Rather, the problems seem to lie in the fact that no systematic and varied efforts have been made to overcome and compensate for some of the present limitations in corporate e-Learning.

Lack of Diversity in e-Learning Contents

Two of the biggest issues related to corporate e-Learning are its uniformity and fairness and availability of opportunities for educational training. In particular, because the uniformity of e-Learning is closely linked to its level of quality and effectiveness, these problems can be said to be magnified.

More specifically, the problems arise from the fact that many of the Internet correspondence training courses prepared for corporate educational training are uniform in terms of their fields of knowledge, types of training, target users, levels, and development methods. Not only are the same courses being developed and taught so that they overlap, they also tend to be either too theory-oriented or concentrated in only certain easy fields.

Development methods also tend to be uniform, unable to fulfill the diverse and specialized needs of corporations. In 2002, 84.6% of the total contents were devoted to developing HTML, ignoring the use of diverse teaching methods such as games and simulations. Even though many teaching methods need to be considered and applied depending on the nature, target audience, and level of the Internet correspondence training materials, much of the training was developed in a uniform manner, taking on the form of providing information in a one-way direction.

Unequal Opportunity to Participate in e-Learning

Second, there are also problems in terms of fairness and balance in educational training opportunities. Currently, the main beneficiaries of Internet correspondence training systems tend to be the office administrative staff of large corporations. In 2000, when corporations administered their own training programs, it was found that all the courses, with the exception of one, were being targeted at workers in large corporations. Moreover,

when we examine the share of total Internet correspondence training by corporations with more than 300 workers year-by-year, we can see an increasing trend with 87.8% in 2002, 96% in 2003, and 93.8% in 2004. In contrast, the share of total Internet correspondence training by corporations with less than 150 workers was less than 2.9% in 2004.

<Table 7-6> shows the phenomenon of ‘the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer’ from previous corporate educational training, being not only reproduced, but in fact becoming worse (the rate of participation in off-line educational training by large corporations with more than 300 workers was 76.4% compared to 23.6% for companies with less than 150 workers).

Internet correspondence training has been viewed as an alternative educational training system for the marginalized class. However, just as workers in assembly lines and in small and medium companies were previously denied equal opportunity to off-line training, they are now being similarly denied equal opportunity to Internet correspondence training.

<Table 7-6> e-Learning according to the Size of the Corporation (as of 2004) (Unit: person(%)) Category Total

Number

Less than 50 Workers

50 Workers to Less than 150

Workers

150 Workers to Less than 300

Workers

More than 300 Workers Internet

correspondence training

804,241 (100.0)

7,640 (0.9)

16,068 (2.0)

25,991 (3.2)

754,542 (93.8)

Off-line training 923,531 (100.0)

87,010 (9.4)

57,281 (6.2)

73,251 (7.9)

705,989 (76.4) Source: Korea Employment Information Center, unpublished data, 2005.