COREA (Curriculum Ontology Reservoir for Education using AI): Korean Prototyping — An English-language technical report of Research Project No. 2025-1-08

Abstract

This is an English-language technical report of a study reported in full, in Korean, as Research Project No. 2025-1-08 under Korea's Educational Development Special Zone — Digital Education Innovation Project. It introduces no data, analysis, or claim absent from the Korean report. The study asked whether AI-based adaptive learning requires a structured, machine-interpretable representation of the national curriculum, what such a representation would contain, and what it would cost. It reports a needs analysis with in-service Korean teachers (a survey of 26 teachers, focus group interviews, and LDA topic modelling of the interview transcripts), an ontology schema prototype for the 2022 Revised Korean National Curriculum, a cost model for construction and maintenance across school subjects, and a working agent prototype that queries the ontology at generation time. Teachers rated factual error and misalignment with curriculum standards as the most serious problems with generative AI in educational use, and rated curriculum-aligned content generation as the most important function an ontology-based agent could provide. Exploratory factor analysis of the problem items returned three factors: alignment and personalization, reliability, and data and system control. Initial construction of curriculum ontologies for all 24 Korean middle-school subjects is estimated at approximately KRW 3.94 billion, with annual maintenance at approximately KRW 409 million. The study establishes that teachers report the need and specifies what an implementation would involve. It does not establish that an ontology-grounded system improves learning or assessment outcomes; no outcome was measured. Funded by the Educational Development Special Zone — Digital Education Innovation Project, Ministry of Education and Daegu Metropolitan Office of Education, and the AI–Digital Convergence Education Innovation Platform, Kyungpook National University. Project No. 2025-1-08.