South Korea has blazed its way into economic prosperity over the past seven decades, and the Korea Development Institute School has been sharing the country’s experience in social and economic development by providing an online database and education projects for civil servants from other countries, the school’s dean said Monday.

Headlining the school’s mission is “K-Developedia,” an online database launched by the Sejong-based institute in 2012 which carries resources related to Korea’s development, including studies, reports, academic journals and statistics.

As of September 2015, K-Developedia has over 30,000 pieces of data produced by a total of 106 local and international organizations including the United Nations, World Bank and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Officials and researchers from 105 countries -- mostly from developing countries -- use the archive each month. Even advanced nations like the United States and Japan go to K-Developedia for information.

“K-Developedia is a website that encompasses all the knowledge and experience of Korea,” said Chun Hong-taek, dean of the KDI School of Public Policy and Management. “There is a lot of data on developmental know-how (of Korea), but the information is scattered all over the place, which makes it hard for officials and researchers from other countries to find relevant data.

“K-Developedia sorts data based on its relation to a certain theme; for example, one seeking to research public-private partnerships can just type it in and find laws, implementation, specific cases and applications in other countries as well,” said Chun, who took helm at the school in January. He called K-Developedia a “creative reorganization” of Korea’s development know-how.

But the project is more than just the accumulation of data. Chun said K-Developedia actively reaches out to see what information people need.

The “theme-based contents project,” slated to be launched in October, will provide content based on the needs and key issues of developing countries. Real-time feedback will be collected and relayed to experts in the respective fields, allowing active interaction between the end users and the service provider.

Chun said in addition to applicability, accessibility is another key concern.

“The narrow interpretation of K-Developedia is an ‘online encyclopedia,’ but it actually embodies research and spreading of (development-related data). This naturally links it to e-learning,” he said.

The KDI School provides 10 online lectures on the development know-how of Korea via iTunes U. The lectures marked over a billion downloads as of September.

Making the information accessible to everyone is “Phase 3” of the K-Developedia project, Chun explained, of which e-learning can play a crucial part. Phase 3 is expected to be completed in the next five years.

“Spreading of this information is related to education, of course,” he said.

Students of the KDI School, which offers master’s and doctorate courses conducted entirely in English, are composed of officials in government, international organizations and corporations. Roughly half of the students have come from 110 countries across the world since the school was founded in 1998 under the state-run KDI.

In addition to degree courses, KDI School also carries out short-term seminars for public officials from developing countries.

Chun, who was previously executive director of the Center for International Development at the KDI, said he hoped the K-Developedia platform would ultimately spread to other countries.

“Right now many countries have data, but do not know how to utilize them to the fullest extent. I think K-Developedia can play a large role in providing guidelines. Someday there might be a network of online database for all countries,” he said.


By Yoon Min-sik
(minsikyoon@heraldcorp.com)