▲ CoolSchool / CEO Oh Jin-yeon

(PowerKorea) The government and cities and provincial education offices set sail a central support consultative body to promote a green smart future school project. It is headed by education vice minister and the committee is formed by heads of 11 related organizations. The project is to turn old schools to eco-friendly future schools and it is one of the 10 tasks of the Korean New Deal. The Ministry of Education and offices of education plan to turn 2,835 rooms of 1,400 schools of more than 40 years old to new eco-friendly future schools by 2025. The government funds 75% and BTL (Build, Transfer and Leade) 25%. A total of 18.5 trillion won ($16.3 billion) is to be poured in the project.

The pandemic has brought a big change to education industry. Face to face has turned into online and edu tech companies are attracting a great attention. One of these edu tech companies is CoolShool that has built its presence in the industry with an open education platform. 

It is estimated that there are around 1,700 edu tech companies in South Korea. Many of them are reportedly having difficulty securing funds despite excellent educational contents that are likely to go into the bin. 

“They are struggling to promote their contents on social media but with feeling of limitation. They are also frustrated by closed public education market that shows lack of interest in the need of edu tech in this day and age” says Oh Jin-yeon, CEO of CoolSchool.

CoolSchool is the very result of Oh’s effort in this respect. The platform embraced almost all necessary educational contents such as edu tech, teaching materials, training materials, textbooks and reference books and profiles of teachers. You might imagine it is a department store that sells almost everything about educational contents. 80 companies including AI and VR sectors are in-housed. Teachers can make e-books of their own contents and run a blog within CoolSchool. 

“CoolSchool is unique in the field as an open educational platform because other similar platforms are mainly running their own contents. In other words, CoolSchool provides equal marketing opportunity to all in-housed contents creators and companies. In order for education industry to grow, I think this kind open platform must be proliferated” says Oh.

Oh is the one who developed cool messenger of Cool Town Sam Story that is being used by 250,000 teachers nationwide and currently is in charge of wholesale marketing. The more contents, says Oh, the bigger the values and the markets. 

On CoolSchool, big data gathers information and suggests customized items to users. The number of hits on each content is transparently open to all and the big data gives managers the analysis on users, their locations and age bands. No matter how good a content is, Oh says, it becomes useless if it is not backed up by effective marketing and big data comes very handy at this point.

A future school involves coding, AI and science as well as necessary teaching materials and contents. This way, the effect and result can be maximized. The public education market, however, makes this cooperation different as each sector such as textbook, contents, interior etc. is separately run. 

CoolSchool, therefore, built all-in-one solution of AI convergence rooms at Seorabeol High School and Seoul Osan High School as examples. The ACS non-contact thermal cameras in particular also records student attendance, sends text to teachers and parents when the temperature is above the allowed level. Up to 30,000 faces can be registered. The ACS non-contact thermal cameras have been installed in 130 schools and kindergartens in the nation at the moment. 

“It is regretful watching excellent contents disappearing due to closed public education market in South Korea. I hope CoolSchool will make a change to this” says Oh. 

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