KERIS Plays a Central Role in Promoting e-Learning for Lifelong Education The Korean government announced in November 2004 a national human resources development initiative to build a solid foundation for lifelong education through e-Learning. The Korea Education & Research Information Service (KERIS) has played a leading role in the implementation of this strategy. KERIS was established in April 1999 as a government funded organization. It is not only Korea's hub for e-learning but also a global leader in the field of e-learning. People from more than 15 countries around the world visit KERIS every year for consultation and benchmarking of the nation's e-learning. Since its establishment, KERIS has provided assistance in the building of cyber education and a lifetime learning system so that everyone in Korea can receive education service anywhere and anytime. Also, KERIS has been building an "advanced knowledge information sharing system" for enhancing academic research capabilities and for assisting higher education under the world's top information infrastructure for education. The main operations of KERIS include EDUNET, a comprehensive educational information portal service that boasts more than 5 million members, and the Cyber Home Learning Center serviced by 16 municipal Offices of Education. In addition, the Research Information Service System (RISS), an academic information service, has been well received by academic researchers since it provides access to source information and full texts of distinguished journal articles and dissertations both in Korea and abroad. In order to provide administrative information on education, KERIS set up NEIS, the National Education Information System designed to provide new and consumer-oriented services with respect to school administrative information. EDUNET and Cyber Home Learning Remodeled in 2004, EDUNET is the nation's largest education site that currently has more than 5.7 million subscribers and 270,000 daily users. The number of teaching and learning materials registered at the portal service today stands at more than 250,000 and about 420,000, respectively. Moreover, users of the service can also experience information sharing, or a minisite, among teachers and the online learning for linking online and offline learning and research that supports various research activities. In addition, Cyber Home Learning is an online self-learning system that provides education services to elementary and junior high-school students through the educational sites, such as "kulmat.com," which means the site of honey taste, operated by 16 municipal Offices of Education. The Cyber Home Learning service, which provides various learning contents in connection with school education, is attracting much interest from abroad as it is the world's first e-learning project undertaken on a national scale. Furthermore, KERIS developed the Learning Management System (LMS), the core element of e-Learning, jointly with the 16 municipal Offices of Education, and have developed two-way self-learning contents. In a recent survey conducted by KERIS and the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development, it was found that 67 percent of the respondents at elementary schools and 60 percent of those in high schools have said that they had seen benefits from the Cyber Home Learning. Consequently, we can draw a conclusion that the cyber learning service is being carried out successfully for the time being. Nonetheless, it is true that there is still plenty of work to be done for its firm establishment like the strengthening of scholastic aptitude assessments of students on an individual basis. The Research Information Service System is a cyber center for the distribution of academic information that allows users to search information held by more than 600 academic institutions and organizations that include colleges and libraries. It is the nation's largest academic research information service to which more than 700,000 people have subscribed. Promoting e-Learning beyond Korea In November 23, KERIS held a ceremony for the signing of mutually cooperative exchange agreements with Education.au of Australia and China Academic Library and Information System (CALIS). The agreement with Education.au is for the conducting of a joint research in regard to the building of an information base for education and the setting up of relevant standards. The agreement with CALIS is for academic exchanges with China. The main contents of the agreement are academic information exchange and joint research for promoting the dissemination of academic information, in addition to combined utilization of academic information. This year, too, people from more than 30 countries including France, Japan, the United States, Mongolia, Israel, and Cambodia showed their interest in Korea's e-Learning project and made visits to KERIS, thus cementing a mutually cooperative network. Moreover, a wide variety of events were held this year so that people around the world could get a true picture of how e-Learning is operated in Korea. Above all, Korea has recently won the official approval from APEC member nations to set up APEC's e-Learning training center in Korea. Prior to the APEC summit this November, KERIS hosted the 2nd Innovative Teachers' Conference during which Korea presented a detailed example of web-based ITC curriculum. In addition to the hosting of international events, KERIS is pushing forward assistance projects in developing countries. To this end, KERIS plans to set up cooperative systems with more than 10 developing countries including Laos, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Dominican Republic, the countries in which we are already engaged in educational endowment projects that include the supply of PCs and consulting services. More efficient administrative system As an education administrative information service, NEIS is devised to build an environment for teachers to concentrate on teaching at schools by reducing their administrative work. To better facilitate such a scheme, KERIS has also revised education institutions' guidelines for protecting personal information last January and will be building a new system that will allow schools to have sufficient server capacities to handle 27 fields of administrative information by adding new servers for three specially administered fields of information that include general affairs, hygiene and admissions. According to the President of KERIS, Hwang Dae-joon, when this new system is completed in March 2006, KERIS expects the beneficial effects of the new system to be visible in regard to the lowering the burden of teachers, satisfying the rights-toknow and raising the efficiency in performing administrative work. The KERIS president added, "To achieve this goal, we will also make headway in transforming the system to provide integrated learning services that can not only track students' achievements but also present individualized solutions for ensuring better scholastic achievements."