TLDR: South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, in collaboration with the Korea Press Foundation, is rolling out a new training program for elementary, middle, and high school teachers. This initiative aims to bolster news and AI literacy among educators by leveraging the ‘BigKinds’ news big data analysis system and ‘BigKinds AI’ for effective instruction.
The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism in South Korea, in partnership with the Korea Press Foundation (KPF), has announced a comprehensive training program designed to enhance news and artificial intelligence literacy among elementary, middle, and high school teachers. This initiative, set to run from July to September 2025, underscores the nation’s commitment to equipping educators with the tools and knowledge necessary to navigate the evolving digital information landscape.
The program will heavily utilize ‘BigKinds,’ a robust news big data platform that has accumulated over 100 million news articles from major domestic media companies since 1990. This platform offers advanced features such as core word flow and related word analysis. Crucially, ‘BigKinds’ began incorporating AI technology in 2024 to provide a user-centered chatbot service, further enhancing its utility for news literacy education. The integration of ‘BigKinds AI’ is central to the training, aiming to provide teachers with practical skills in leveraging big data and AI for educational purposes.
The ‘BigKinds-based news literacy teacher training’ addresses the critical need for news literacy education in an era marked by digital environment changes, including information acquisition influenced by algorithmic biases and the proliferation of fake news. The program seeks to confirm the value of news literacy as a solution to these challenges.
A workshop held on July 25th at the press center saw 50 elementary, middle, and high school teachers participate. Educators from the EdTech teacher research group provided lectures on the effective use of ‘BigKinds’ and shared examples of its application in classroom settings. Participants also engaged in sessions on the ‘Electronic Newspaper Utilization Education Program (eNIE)’ and collaboratively developed news literacy lesson plans.
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Over the course of 12 sessions from July to September, the Press Foundation’s Media Research Institute will train approximately 30 teachers per session. Each 4-hour lecture and practical training will cover theories of news big data and generative AI, aiming to deepen teachers’ understanding of news and AI. The practical training will include sharing examples of news and AI understanding lessons and directly designing lesson plans applicable in educational environments. This program represents a significant step in empowering South Korean teachers to foster critical thinking and media discernment among their students in the age of artificial intelligence.
