Audiovisual lessons in the 1950s, and four later periods

Educational technology, the essay says, takes a historical starting point around the 1910s, in related educational movements that became its foundation. In Korea the history is said to begin when audiovisual education was introduced in earnest around the 1950s, during the Korean War. After that decade the country’s development is divided into four stages: a formative period, a period of growth, a period of maturity, and a period of taking off. Those stages stay with the decades the notes give them, and are not recast as a later official chronology.

The formative period runs from the 1950s through the 1960s, a time when education was spoken of as part of a national modernisation, and American theories and methods were introduced, the notes say, only in fragments and at a basic level. Even so, there was a clear will to improve the traditional classroom and to change school teaching with newer methods, and that will is treated as a foundation. The period of growth is placed from the 1970s, with the Korean Educational Development Institute and the Korean Behavioral Science Institute at the centre, producing and using teaching and learning programmes. Programmed learning, mastery learning, inquiry-lesson models, systems theory, and a new instructional-system model based on a systems approach were studied in order to improve school lessons. In the late 1970s a research project on a new education system for elementary and secondary schools was begun, and a new instructional system fitted to domestic conditions was treated as a basic need. Seeing education as a system, and stressing preparation, design, and development — instructional design, or the development of an instructional system — became an important element.

Maturity in the 1980s, a take-off in the mid-1990s, and a definition after Galbraith

The period of maturity is placed after the 1980s, when modern American theories and methods of educational technology, unfolding inside a movement to make education more scientific and more engineering in its approach, were taken up and applied more actively. With the rapid advance of science and engineering, and with an information society taking shape, new curricula and new ways of running a school system were looked for from more than one side. The period of taking off is placed after the mid-1990s, when, the notes say, Korean educational technology gained a fuller basis on which to leap. The Ministry of Education pushed an informatisation project for elementary and secondary schools, aiming to raise people fitted to an information society and to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of education. The work ran from a basic infrastructure, through the development and distribution of educational information materials, the strengthening of teaching that uses information technology, the informatisation of educational administration, and the building of academic-information databases.

A definition is then offered, after consulting definitions by educational technologists. Educational technology is the study, and the ethical practice, of creating, using, and managing appropriate technological processes and resources in order to improve learning and performance. Learning sits at the centre: the phenomena and principles of how learning happens, and the development and carrying-out of strategies for efficient learning, are treated as important tasks. An attempt to step away from a traditional audiovisual approach is dated from the 1970s. Traditional audiovisual education had mainly stressed how to use a medium; educational technology took a systematic, engineering approach to designing, running, and evaluating the whole teaching-and-learning process. The notes refer to a definition by the economist Galbraith, and say that after the Association for Educational Communications and Technology in the United States gave an official definition, the field kept specifying it. Communication theory and systems theory are said to have travelled with the field, and when communication theory joined its principles, discussion of how to communicate well in a teaching situation helped form the field’s identity.

A system of teacher, learner, content, and room, and a cycle that does not run in a straight line

A system, in this use, is a set of related parts that cooperate toward a common purpose. In educational technology the parts that make an educational system are said to include the teacher, the learner, the content, and the elements of the environment, interacting so that an educational purpose can be reached. A systems approach is a logical process: analysing a problem, setting a goal, choosing among alternative solutions and strategies, carrying them out, and evaluating and revising. After the relations among the parts have been used to make the goal clear, the educational task is carried out, the result is judged against the goal, and the process is corrected. Because the parts are seen together, and because their organic links are valued, the notes say this way of thinking allowed a more flexible view of an educational system, and also influenced research on teaching.

The implication drawn for instruction is a five-step cycle: defining a problem, analysing it, designing and developing a way through, carrying it out, and evaluating and revising. Those activities, the notes say, do not only follow one another in a straight line; they move in a whole, repeated loop, and the parts keep interacting, being corrected, and being supplemented toward the final purpose. Systems theory, on this page, is what established instructional design and the development of instructional systems as core fields of educational technology. The outline of the essay also names five major areas, and an application of each to an early-childhood setting, with the writer’s own examples. Those sections are not filled in the portion of the core that could be used here, and no list of areas, and no classroom example, is added. The same Korean essay, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A class essay on the definition of educational technology and on its historical development in Korea, including four periods after the 1950s.
2. A starting point around the 1910s for the field at large; audiovisual education introduced in Korea around the 1950s, during the Korean War; a formative period, a period of growth around the Korean Educational Development Institute and the Korean Behavioral Science Institute from the 1970s, a period of maturity from the 1980s, and a take-off from the mid-1990s with a Ministry of Education informatisation project — as the notes date those stages.
3. A definition of educational technology as study and ethical practice, with reference to Galbraith and to an official definition by the American AECT, and a five-step systems cycle for instruction that is said not to run only in a straight line.
4. Five major areas and an early-childhood application are named in the outline but are not present in the dumped unique body, and are not invented here.

Last updated: 14 November 2026