VOL.81/2025.04

AI Digital Textbook Policy and the Publishing Industry

2025.02.17

The “AI Digital Textbook” vision: 5 million textbooks for 5 million students!

This is the vision set forth by the Ministry of Education, the main policy maker for national education in Korea, in June 2023 when it announced plans to promote AI digital textbooks. AI digital textbooks are textbooks loaded with various learning materials and learning aid features using intellectual information technology, such as AI, to support a variety of customized learning opportunities that match students’ abilities and levels. They are an innovative policy focusing on the pure mission of normalizing public education through educational transformation by using textbooks that incorporate AI, the most significant topic of the era.
In accordance with the AI Digital Textbook Promotion Plan, the Ministry of Education promptly announced the AI Digital Textbook Development Guidelines (August 30, 2023), informed the public of the implementation of AI Digital Textbook Authorization (August 31, 2023), and held a briefing session on the AI Digital Textbook Development Guidelines (September 7, 2023); and from this point on, textbook publishers began to develop AI digital textbooks in earnest by collaborating with EdTech companies in line with the Ministry’s development plan schedule. The collaboration with EdTech was necessary as most textbook publishers do not possess technologies such as AI and data analysis, which are the core of digital textbooks. The Ministry of Education also encouraged collaboration between textbook publishers and EdTech companies by holding an “AI Digital Textbook Matching Day” in the first half of 2024. This March, exactly 20 months after the development guidelines were announced, the country’s first national AI digital textbook, said to be the world’s first, will be implemented in schools.

Controversies over the rollout schedule and textbook status of AI Digital Textbooks

Math, English, and Informatics, the subjects targeted for the first year of AI digital textbooks, finalized the authorization review process in November last year. In early December, the web exhibition of the approved textbooks was launched, and by the time of this article in late January 2025, the on-site adoption of which publisher’s textbooks to use by each school should have been finalized. However, late last year, the National Assembly passed an amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which created a huge roadblock for AI digital textbooks, changing their status from textbooks that must be used in all schools to educational materials that are left to the autonomy of schools.
The regulation of AI digital textbooks as educational materials rather than textbooks is a different level of problem than the over-immersion of digital devices, decrease in literacy, and hindrance of cognitive development, which have been raised as adverse effects of the introduction of AI digital textbooks. This is because the Ministry of Education has been promoting the AI digital textbook policy, claiming the guarantee of fair educational opportunities through the realization of individualized education as the greatest value, and the policy was based on the premise that AI digital textbooks have the status of textbooks. On January 17, the National Assembly’s Education Commission held a hearing on AI digital textbooks to verify the process and appropriateness of introducing AI digital textbooks, but it only confirmed the tense arguments of those who want to give AI digital textbooks the status of textbooks and leave them to the autonomy of each school for one year to verify their effectiveness, and those who want to give AI digital textbooks the status of educational materials and introduce them in stages after verifying their effectiveness. The government quickly exercised its right of reconsideration request on January 21 on the amendment of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that lowered the status of AI digital textbooks to educational materials, and the bill has now been sent back to the National Assembly.
Although the Ministry of Education has revised the existing policy to postpone the introduction of AI digital textbooks for one year and allow school autonomy, there is a big difference depending on whether it is a textbook or educational material. This is because it is directly related to the key issue of mandatory versus voluntary use in schools and copyright and pricing issues with companies that have applied AI digital textbooks.

The Great Shift in Textbook Publishing Culture: Building a New Development Ecosystem

So far, there has been no case of a full-scale introduction of AI learning systems in public education, and the digital content utilized by some schools is only at the level of supplementing teaching and learning. In this context, the introduction of AI digital textbooks is, in a word, a major shift in Korea’s textbook publishing culture. This is because the problems considered as limitations and barriers in education in the past will be effectively incorporated into textbooks with positive changes solved by digital technology, thus establishing a textbook development ecosystem that is significantly different from the existing book-type textbooks.
As demonstrated during the first-year curriculum development process last year, AI digital textbooks use AI to provide personalized learning by analyzing students’ learning levels, provide immediate feedback, and systematically manage learning data; therefore, only the combination of the best technologies and capabilities, such as AI infrastructure, learning content, platforms, and solutions, can produce meaningful results. Also, as the number of subjects for development expands, the ecosystem of textbook publishing will expand further, which will require more cooperative efforts between members. The same is true for changes in the field of textbook publishing, which is directly related to textbook publishing.

The challenges of AI digital textbooks that global education should pay attention to

While every policy may have some pluses and minuses, there are usually both positive and negative aspects. Therefore, the focus of policy implementation is based on the positive aspects of the policy, while trying to minimize the negative aspects. Now, the government will give schools a year’s grace period to implement, utilize, and verify the effectiveness of AI digital textbooks before the full implementation, and the world’s education community will be watching closely as Korea is the first country in the world to introduce AI into public education.
Hence, by proving that the positive features of the policy emphasized by the Ministry of Education are entirely operative, it is hoped that the world’s first AI digital textbook will become an important turning point for Korea’s educational innovation, going beyond mere digitization to support each individual student’s learning to improve classes effectively.

Written by Kim Hoon-Beom (Mirae-N)