Now in Korea lots of workers are enrolled at the study-while-working online college. On questions answer Kim Il Nam, rector of the online college of Kim Chaek University of Technology.
Who enrolls at the online college.
Anybody who desires to study at the college can be admitted to it. When my college started the online education in October 2010, all the students were industrial workers. But as science and technology have been further integrated with production and the leading role of science and technology has strengthened in the economic sector, more and more people want to learn science and technology. As a result, public interest in the online education grows day after day. At present not only industrial workers but also university graduates are enrolling at the college out of their desire to be familiar with the trends in the development of modern science and technology. And leading of fi cers of industrial establishments attend my college. But most of the students are industrial workers. At first the online education was given to over 40 workers of the Hwanghae Iron and Steel Complex, and now over 20 000 working people of over 4 000 factories and enterprises across the country are receiving the education. The workers can attend online lectures at sci-tech learning spaces of their workplaces or via the State computer network. And those who want to get the online education can receive it anywhere else.
Online study type
At the outset we selected the subjects in relation to the education of the university and gave the relevant lectures alone. But it could not satisfy the requirement of the developing times and aspiration of the people. So we boldly broke with the stereotyped and uniform lecture mode and innovated the form and contents of the education. Now 500 to 600 subjects on 40-odd indexes have been put into a database to give lectures, and the workers are very glad to be able to receive lectures on subjects they choose. Moreover, we have arranged a non-real-time question-and- answer system that makes it possible to question and answer at any time besides a similar real-time system operated at a fixed time, and thus the worker students can learn to their heart’s content at their convenient time. And previously a teacher dealt with only one student at a question-and-answer time, but now many students can discuss their views with the teacher at a time by means of question and answer. Those students with high scholarship graduate from the college ahead of schedule.
What roles do the graduates play in practice
My college produced its fi rst graduates in 2015. And many students graduate from the college with high marks every year, and some of them were awarded degrees as well as certificates of graduation. Generally, the graduates present their graduation papers on solving problems in production, so they are of high value. Those papers are immediately translated into reality, greatly contributing to the technical development of the industrial establishments concerned, and their publication enjoyed high appreciation at the national sci-tech festivals and the sci-tech paper readings. Now my college graduates are favourably commented upon at their workplaces across the country including the Hwanghae Iron and Steel Complex and the Osoksan Granite Mine. They are distinguishing themselves as inventors, technical innovators and masters of sci-tech development.
Future Programme
Our country is striving to turn itself into a talent power and make all the people well-versed in science and technology. So it can be said that the duty of my college is growing greater in training in a planned way able managerial personnel capable of running technically intensive industry and modernized economy at factories and enterprises, and building up the sci-tech development forces. In keeping with the reality we are now arranging many places for real-time lectures, further improving the system in operation at present and developing the one accessible to more and more students. Together with this, we are also developing various systems conducive to the study of the students. I think this will make it possible to train lots of workers across the country into those with the knowledge of university graduate’s level and masters of sci-tech development.
