EBS CSAT Online Courses Make Shaky Start

The Education Broadcasting System (EBS) will start CSAT courses via satellite as planned and run a three-month pilot online project for the same courses starting April 1 as a variety of glitches are expected to surface because of ill-preparations for the courses’ online availability.

“CSAT courses will be broadcasted via satellite and online starting April 1,” said assistant minister Seo Beom-seok of the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development. “However, we will run a three-month pilot to counter various issues involving webcasting.”

“During three months’ time, we will have to suspend the webcasting of the courses periodically if there are overloads or system failures.”

The ministry is now facing criticism that it precipitately announced the plan for webcasting without sufficient consideration.

The Number of Users Not Projected—

The government plans to install a server which allows 100,000 simultaneous logons in the EBS by March. If it is not enough, it will install a 50,000 simultaneous logon-cable server in Korea Education Research and Information Service.

“The EBS courses are aimed at 1.6 million people. Nobody can tell how many of them will log on to the website simultaneously,” said a ministry official. “We will encourage schools to download the course and dissuade individual students from logging on to the EBS site from their schools.”

It takes a Pentium II PC with Windows 98 and above and Windows Media Player to watch the classes online.

What Are the Courses About?—

About 5,105 courses on 51 subjects will be produced in the period leading up to CSAT. The 3,805 intermediate courses taught by high school teachers will be broadcasted via satellite. A total of 1,300 basic and advanced courses will be webcasted free of charge.

There will be 10 basic and advanced course respectively and 11 intermediates ones. The intermediate courses are similar to the courses the EBS is currently offering. The content of them will be consistent with regular high school curriculum so they can be used for tutoring at home and at school. They will also offer question-type analyses and mock questions for CSAT.

How to Use the Courses—

EBS’s satellite channel, EBS Plus 1, will air the same courses three times a day. It will rerun them on weekends. The courses will be available online within 24 hours of their first broadcasting.

The EBS will develop new textbooks for the courses and will release them by late March. It will make such subjects in low demand as Career Research or Second Foreign Language available online and free of charge.

“In one way or another, what’s covered in the EBS courses will be reflected in the CSAT,” the ministry said. “A taskforce has been formed to review the ratio of the EBS courses’ content in the CSAT and ways to incorporate it into CSAT questions.”