[Courtesy of SK Telecom]
After a lockdown of schools that lasted about a month to prevent the spread of COVID-19, all school students were allowed to take turns for offline classes on September 21 while other students take part in classroom activities using remote services. Third-grade high school students were allowed to study at their schools because they have to prepare for a state university entrance exam at the end of the year.
SK Telecom (SKT) said in a statement that the company has partnered with the Gwangju Metropolitan Office of Education to participate in the National Information Society Agency (NIA) to develop and provide a two-way interactive remote classroom service to some 200,000 students in Gwangju some 270 kilometers (167 miles) southwest of Seoul by the end of this year.
"We hope that our service development could contribute to the establishment of the future educational environment for the post-coronavirus era," an SKT official was quoted as saying. The coronavirus pandemic has left teachers and students without any choice but to use remote classroom services.
Especially, primary school students who have not yet experienced systemized education found it hard to adapt to learning a new environment without actual teachers, classrooms and classmates. "My son refuses to take remote classes because he does not think they are real. I am having big trouble to have him focus on the online classes," Lee Jeong-ok, a 41-year-old restaurant owner and a mother of a 7-year-old boy, told Aju News.
The remote classroom service will be based on SKT's group video chat app "MeetUs". SKT will add 5G communication and AI technologies to provide better features with enhanced video quality, voice recognition and interactive communication between teachers and students.
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com
Copyright ⓒ Aju Press All rights reserved.
