Media Education in Higher Learning Institutions in Korea: Changes and Realities Reflected in Curricula

Abstract

Over the years, the types of media and media usage patterns have rapidly changed and communication channels in society have diversified. The courses in the universities on “media” have accordingly been altered to adapt to these changes. To investigate the ways in which the higher learning institutions in Korea have adapted to the changes in the media environment, this study analyzed the curriculum provided by the communication/media departments in the areas of Seoul and Gyeonggi-do. For the curricula analysis,names of the course soffered at the selected universitie swere analyzed; then keywords were extracted from morphological analysis of thes enames. Also, to investigate the changes over time, the courses offered in the years 2008 and 2017 were selected. The network analysis was done by using Netminer; the shape, main components, and major nodes of the network were compared. The results showed that firstly, overall shape of network from 2008 and 2017 looked similar. Due to the existence of concentrations within the major, the overall shape of the network showed several independent components, rather than one network. However, the analysis revealed differences in major nodes in the 2008 case from 2017. In the 2008 case, ‘programming,’ ‘media,’ ‘introduction’ among others were the major nodes; in 2017, ‘editing’ was the most important node. This signifies that in 2017, the curricula in the selected universities emphasized more practical and technical media education. In other words, the universities have adapted to the changing environments by including new topics, paying more attention to video media, and providing students with more direct field experiences.