Two children, first and third graders, attend online classes via a tablet and notebook PC at their home in Gwangju, southwestern South Korea, on April 20, 2020. (Yonhap)
SEOUL, Feb. 8 (Korea Bizwire) — As online classes are scheduled for this year’s academic calendar, parents are increasingly concerned over their children’s addiction to YouTube.
What begins with a YouTube link shared by school teachers on an online education platforms ends with children not knowing when to stop watching videos, parents claim.
Choi, a 42 year-old mother with a child going to elementary school, said her child spends the whole day “watching YouTube.”
“If we log into the remote education platform, there are a couple of PowerPoint slides with summaries of the day’s class, and YouTube links for reference.”
The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family conducted a national survey of 438,416 students, all of whom were in fourth grade at elementary schools, which found that 65,774 of them (15 percent) were exposed to a high risk of addiction to the internet and smartphones, up by 16.7 percent since the previous year.
Parents complain that schools use too many YouTube links, inciting students to depend on the video platform even further.
In fact, a survey of 752,460 people, including teachers, students, and parents conducted by the Ministry of Education showed that 19.2 percent of all content used for remote schooling were YouTube videos.
Looking at elementary schools only, more than one quarter (25.3 percent) of all content used for remote schooling turned out to be YouTube videos.
“Remote classes came as a surprise to a lot of us teachers last year, and we have struggled a lot to conduct two-way remote classes or design appropriate curriculum,” said a teacher from a local elementary school in Daegu.
“But a year has passed since, and we have no excuse for the fact that there are teachers who still depend on YouTube videos.”
Lina Jang (linajang@koreabizwire.com)
