Questions/Answers

The GEME as a Game Changer in Learning and a Hub for Gender Equality The Korean Institute for Gender Equality Promotion and Education(KIGEPE) as the sole specialized organization in gender equality education under the umbrella of Ministry of Gender Equality and Family used to offer education programs mostly in group settings only to limited groups of learners by 2014. However, to be in sync with the paradigm shift that ‘The Framework Act on Women’s Development’ established in 1995 evolved into ‘the Framework Act on Gender Equality’ in 2015, the KIGEPE determined to grow out of the outdated educational model. So it was replaced with a more self-directed learning model designed for wider audiences and soon the mobile education platform entitled the Gender Equality MEdia(GEME) was born in March 2015. The GEME users can enjoy interesting mobile education contents, ranging from 30 seconds to 5 minutes in length, and this game-changing educational tool helps them to ‘improve their awareness’ and to ‘modify their behaviors’ regarding gender equality issues.(The 'GEME' also implies the joy of self-motivated learning as its pronunciation sounds like ‘fun’ in Korean.) As an ubiquitous educational tool(free of charge and no need for subscription), the GEME's Youtube-based hub pages and the embedded links to a variety of SNS channels resulted in educational contents with over four-million cumulative views – a proof that the idea of gender equality has been shared and spread across the cyberspace extensively. At the same time, the professional KIGEPE instructors and school teachers, as a primary consumers of the GEME and a vehicle for contents dissemination, have been playing a critical role in delivering the knowledge to over 10 million citizens. The GEME as a collaboration hub for a society with gender equality also has helped various gender equality networks to expand their scale and build larger alliances by bridging the gap between online and offline communities.

Raising Public Awareness on Gender Equality through the GEME Many domestic news articles covering gender equality issues from 2012 to 2014 evidence that the Korean society still has a long way to go in terms of gender equality, because the level of awareness on gender equality, gender violence, and gender discrimination have not been improved as much as they need. So the KIGEPE designed the mobile education platform and launched the GEME in March 2015 to embrace a wider range of audiences instead of giving just collective and limited groups of people. The KIGEPE has produced 526 proprietary, high-quality mobile contents and they were uploaded to the GEME’s ‘Hub Pages.’ These mobile contents in fact were first mounted on Youtube where numerous users around the world share and distribute countless videos and were once again shared, distributed, and spread through the KIGEPE’s social media channels (such as Facebook, and blog pages). The contents as a result achieved over four-million cumulative views and this achievement laid a foundation for further sharing and spread of the knowledge on the internet. At the same time, the professional KIGEPE instructors and school teachers, as a primary consumers of the platform and a vehicle for contents dissemination, have played an integral role in providing over 10 million citizens with gender equality education in the physical world.

An Impact on ‘Promoting Gender Responsive Public Services’ to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goal 5 The GEME is closely related with ‘the SDG 5: Gender Equality.’ It thus fits under ’the 3rd category(Promoting gender responsive public services to achieve the SDGs) and meets the four out of seven criteria listed in the category. ① Adopted an innovative ‘open sharing platform’ to encourage more citizens to take part in raising the awareness of gender equality (criteria 1) ② Forged a social environment where women can actively participate in decision-making and public service delivery processes by distributing and spreading mobile education contents on ‘Women’s Empowerment.’ (criteria 4) ③ Improved the accountability of the government in terms of producing policies and institutions responsive to the needs of socially vulnerable women by offering gender equality and violence prevention education programs to policy makers and government officers. (criteria 5) ④ Initiated awareness-raising public campaigns including ‘Breaking the Glass Ceiling’ and ‘Guidance to Building and Utilizing the Female Talent Database,’ with an aim to encourage public institutions work harder to increase the number of female workers in the public sector and in decision-making positions particularly by putting more incentives into or revise their personnel policies. (criteria 6)

Improving Public Awareness and Spreading the Idea of Gender Equality to Address Gender Inequality and Empower Women The KIGEPE has continued to make and distribute contents regarding gender equality, prevention of four major types of violence, and women’s empowerment for the entire public who are clients of the KIGEPE’s public services. One of the main focuses of this ceaseless effort is creating education contents(about eliminating unreasonable discrimination and violence against a specific gender, empowering women, breaking the glass ceiling, or giving a right to equal pay between women and men for equal work) and its educational objectives are in line with ‘achieving gender equality and empower all women and girls’ - a title of SDG 5(Gender Equality). The top 15 most viewed contents on the platform in fact are all associated with this Goal. It turned out that women(especially those in their 30s or 40s who are suffering from career discontinuation due to childbirth or child-care) whose labor force participation rate is lower than that of men have a higher demand for easily-accessible online education contents(according to the survey based on the KIGEPE blog user data, 38.3% of male and 61.7% of female users demanded such mobile contents). This high demand implies that the GEME has been served as a useful tool for gender equality and women’s empowerment.

A Gender Equality Navigator at Arm’s Length Open to Anyone Regardless of Gender and Age In the past, those who want to take a gender equality or a violence prevention course had to either attend an offline class in group or use a computer to join an online class. To make the matter worse, the process of taking a class was complex. They first need to subscribe to a program, book a class, and then pay the tuition fee and this complexity discouraged many. Yet, the birth of the GEME led to an accumulation of easily-accessible mobile education contents on a single platform and the idea of gender equality as well as prevention of violence begun to penetrate into the entire society fast. Self-motivated learning in everyday life matters the most today and the mobile education hub GEME is thus of great significance as it removes all the inconveniences by offering a free-of-charge, non-subscription, unrestricted access to the global community. The GEME contents open to anyone have seen the increase in views and it took three years for the GEME since the inception to reach 1,068,000 (cumulative) views at the end of 2017. In the same period of time, a total of 526 contents were crafted by the KIGEPE and the GEME today is regarded as a gender equality navigator open to everyone regardless of gender and age.

The Primary Influence on the Professional KIGEPE Instructors The professional KIGEPE instructors as a primary consumer of the GEME had longed for the birth of the GEME and have utilized it the most since the beginning. ‘The Survey Outcome Report on Professional Instructor Training and Management Programs (November 2017)’ interviewed 1,273 out of a total of 2,039 instructors at the end of 2017 and it revealed the GEME service brought a highly positive impact on the instructors responsible for gender equality and violence prevention education for the general public. Over 87% respondents replied that they have been using the GEME and 97.7% out of whom accessed to it have been raising the public awareness of and spreading the idea of gender equality across the society. The Secondary Influence on the General Public An active utilization of the GEME as a supplementary source of education enabled the instructors to display the better-than-ever performance in terms of the public education. Before the GEME was introduced, they had taught only 12.13 million in total for 10 years, but the number of students who took their class recorded 11.87 million(about 23% of the total Korean population) in just three years(2015-2017) since the launch of the GEME. Also, those who live on islands, high mountains, or in remote villages have better accessiblity to education thanks to the GEME.

A Paradigm Shift in Teaching to Induce ‘Behavioral Modifications’ of Learners Building on the ‘awareness improvement’(a change of thoughts leads to a change of behaviors, and eventually to a change of habits), the GEME added another element of ‘behavioral modifications’(a change of behaviors leads to a change of habits, and ultimately to a change of thoughts). It also extended the scope of learners to offer regular education to the entire citizens. Moreover, its educational contents and teaching methods are innovative enough to cause a paradigm shift in learning and make students more self-motivated. The GEME as an Essence of Innovation As a mobile education platform, the GEME set itself apart from other existing platforms. Being free from temporal and spatial limitations, mobile education is effective in terms of improving the autonomy and satisfactory level of learners of different ages and jobs. Intriguing mobile educational contents on the platform whose length is between 30 seconds and 5 minutes have been delivered either as part of an official education curriculum in the form of a flipped classroom or as an independent content. As such, they have permeated into people’s busy everyday lives and catalyzed them to change their behaviors and habits in a subtle way. The GEME also implies the joy of self-motivated learning as its pronunciation sounds like ‘fun’ in Korean.

Study the Old and Learn the New The GEME developers in the beginning studied the mobile education service system called U-KNOU of the Korea National Open University as a reference model, which was one of the most widely used lifelong education services for adult Koreans. They also examined other existing mobile or smart learning systems made by the Central Officials Training Institute etc. to get some ideas of a new, better platform. However, the GEME is not just a clone of them. It is an unique system capable of widely distributing and disseminating short and fun mobile education contents based on Youtube - a scalable medium armed with 2.4 billion(the number of monthly visitors) worldwide users. Once uploaded on Youtube, the contents are then conveyed to a wider audiences through various social network channels including the KIGEPE’s SNS. Recognizing the multiplier effect of social networks, the KIGEPE adopted an upload strategy of organically incorporating various SNS into the platform. It took 15 years for the KIGEPE since 2003 to teach one million students offline (until 2017); however, the GEME recorded a cumulative viewership of 1,068,000 only from March 2015 until the end of 2017. Simultaneously, the KIGEPE actively posted various contents on its Facebook, Twitter, and Naver blog pages and each achieved a cumulative views of 1,029,000, 1,038,000, 946,000 respectively.

Manpower and Financial Inputs to Build Hardware, Software and Humanware The GEME has three core pillars. "Hardware" refers to its physical structure. To ensure a seamless connection with various social network channels, this multi-functional platform is equipped with online Hub Pages(geme.kigepe.or.kr), responsive web designs, and user-centered interfaces. "Software" means its mobile educational contents. They have won the hearts of many with empathetic contents of various forms, including videos, card news, web cartoons, and infographics. "Humanware" is an asset made of extensive internal & external human networks, including platform administrators and content producers in- and outside of KIGEPE and the primary consumers of or content deliverers for the GEME. When it comes to the direct expenses for the GEME building and operation, the initial hardware setup costed USD 1.32 million(KRW 14.15 billion) and another USD 0.47 million(KRW 0.5 billion) is being spent every year for software development. This investment led to the creation and distribution of 526 proprietary mobile education contents(about 175 per annum). Of course some indirect costs have been inevitably incurred at the same time to stably manage the GEME and make it settle down well, including labor expenses associated with developers and operators who engaged in the GEME development directly and indirectly.

Yes

An Optimized Solution for Other Fields in Need of an Education-based Awareness-Raising Tool The concept of ‘gender equality’ is too abstract. The way people understand and interpret it varies from one another and therefore reaching a wide consensus or raising overall awareness is not a easy task. However, the GEME’s intuitive, easily-accessible mobile contents have successfully alter people’s mindset and attitude gradually yet evidently just like the dried earth gradually soaked by drizzle without knowing it. People’s comments about the contents distributed and spread through SNS or their sharing or liking patterns are all indicators that tell how much their behavior or attitude has been changed. The ‘behavioral modification’ approach, a belief that entertaining mobile education contents can change people’s behaviors or habits, also turned out to be valid and highly advantageous. Hence, public institutions in need of promulgating a certain value as comprehensive or abstract as gender equality(like values of global importance associated with SDGs including safety, human rights, environment, healthcare) may produce good results if they employ a solution modeled after the GEME. If seamless connections are made among public institutions around the world based on a global content sharing site such as Youtube or Facebook, values of great importance for human beings will grow faster.

Social – Conducting a Regular Research on Gender Equality Awareness of the Public More large-scale researches on the difference between men and women in the awareness of gender equality need to be carried out either annually or biennially, so that the society can understand it in details. One prime example is ‘the first Research on the Current State of Gender Equality’ initiated by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family in 2016. There have been small-scale researches led by media organizations, private companies, research centers, or other private players in need of such data. However, a greater amount of reliable data need to be produced by trustworthy government institutions in order for the GEME to precisely gauge how much the awareness of gender equality has been improved and to set the future direction based on it. Financial – Securing a Budget to Produce Contents for the Entire Age Groups Even though the majority of contents on the GEME are for adults, only a few of them are suitable for senior citizens. Contents for children or preschoolers are also small in number compared to those for teenager. This means that additional budget needs to be secured for at least a few years to create enough contents for those age groups. Environmental – Taking the Awareness-raising Efforts to the Next Level through Global Cooperation Some international institutions have been engaging in the global effort to realize gender equality, with a focus on SDGs for all human beings. Sharing the knowledge and cooperating with them both on and offline will help the KIGEPE better comprehend the global standards as well as region-specific conditions. For the KIGEPE, various symposiums, education programs and campaigns been used as a venue for international cooperation with the UN Women, the UNDP and other Asian countries. It is time for the KIGEPE to move up to the next level of global cooperation through the GEME building on these achievement mentioned above.

The Trinity of a Sustainable System As explained already, the GEME is a system held up by three pillars(hardware, software and humanware) and ensures sustainable effectiveness with no limitation of time and space. It will continue to be upgraded because a certain amount of budget will be allocated every year to maintain, repair, and functionally improve the hardware. The software will be updated and expanded to reflect the changing needs of users and the human networks will grow bigger with higher density as time goes by. This is a reasonable assumption rather than just a rosy prediction. The GEME in its birth-year of 2015 received only 134,885 visitors but the figure jumped up to 560,599 a year later. The number in the third year exceeded one million (1,068,667 precisely), heralding a bright future. Sustainable Linkage between Online and Offline Education The GEME’s linkages with various channels(e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Naver Blog) will generate even greater synergies because of the multiplier effect of SNS. The KIGEPE’s Facebook page has presented contents jointly made with the major broadcasting companies and the content producer (namely, SBS, EBS, CBS, and DotFace) who are an active user of social networks. This collaboration led to an increase in the number of likes and shares of each post and also in the number of subscribers to the KIGEPE’s Facebook page, making the institution more reputable than ever before. The KIGEPE in order to guarantee the substantiality of the GEME has worked hard to forge a reliable offline partnership at the same time with elementary, middle, and high schools as well as with local government agencies, intermediated by city or provincial offices of education. Other trustworthy partners include 85 institutions who signed a memorandum of understanding with the KIGEPE and 31 nationwide members of the Council for the Promotion of Gender Equality Education.

Yes

Contents Service Quality Certification by the Good Content Service against the GEME The GEME submitted its three-year operation and performance record to the government authority(the Ministry of Science and ICT) responsible for ‘the Contents Service Quality Certification’ to test its quality and obtained the G(Good) Certification on November 17th, 2017. This Certification assesses fifteen qualifications under the three categories: ①service technology(6 sub criteria / 1.1.1 Accuracy~1.3.3 User-friendly Design) ②service infrastructure(6 sub criteria / 2.1.1 Financial State~2.3.2 Disclosure of Terms and Conditions of Use) ③customer management(3 sub criteria / 3.1.1~3.2.1 Customer Satisfaction & Complain Monitoring) The certification authority not only examines the physical aspect of the GEME composed of hardware and software or the service infrastructure(embedded technologies and elements for service delivery), but also evaluates the humanware which is a key enabler for the service delivery. The GEME went through the two-stage evaluation process - the preliminary assessment (criteria: service technology, service infrastructure, and customer management) by the Expert Evaluation Group(7 panel members) and the secondary satisfactory level evaluation(criteria: institutional compliance, user-friendliness, and customer management) by the User Evaluation Group(30 evaluators).

Evaluation Outcome and Score The certification authority does not disclose the written opinions of the Groups (only notify whether the application is accepted or rejected). For this reason, the statement below was written based on the information derived from the certification letter and the accompanying annexes. The GEME evaluated and certified by the authority is a mobile education hub which delivers education contents on gender equality and violence prevention across the world. This free-of-charge platform does not require any subscription and offers all-the-time access and sharing. The GEME boasts user-friendliness design for all as the menu bar help users navigate it by theme or by target audience(General Public / Children and Preschoolers / Teenagers and Youngsters / School Teachers / Military and Police Officers). In addition, the GEME as a content hub has been actively sharing and cooperating with government institutions, municipalities, schools, and private companies and this effort received high praise. The authority paid a particular interest in how hard the KIGEPE worked to listened to the opinions of professional KIGEPE instructors(the primary consumers of the GEME) through the satisfaction survey customized for them. In this process, the instructors were also contented with its contents, giving a high point of 4.12 out of 5 in overall.

1.1.1 Accuracy: The level of consistency between the information described in a content and an actual fact 1.1.2 Compatibility: The level of compatibility with a variety of operating systems and web browsers 1.2.1 Safety: The capability of maintaining the normal operation or recovering the system 1.3.1 Convenience of Searching: The capability of swiftly providing correct contents 1.3.2 Easiness of Payment: A variety of payment options and the easiness of payment 1.3.3 User-friendly Design of Navigation Menu: The overall composition of navigation menu and its user-friendliness 2.1.1 Financial State: The financial soundness of an organization 2.1.2 Public Reputation: The reputation of a company or of its services 2.2.1 Service Strategies: The preparation of well-organized strategies for sustainable service provision 2.2.2 Organizational Structure and Manpower: The appropriateness of the organizational structure and manpower 2.3.1 Disclosure of Information Protection: The level of conformity to applicable governmental rules 2.3.2 Disclosure of Terms and Conditions of Use: The provision of terms and conditions 3.1.1 Customer Satisfaction Monitoring: The preparation of a variety of channels to collect customers’ opinion 3.1.2 Protection of Private Information: The capability of protecting customers’ private information 3.2.1 Customer Complain Monitoring and Management

GEME as a Hub for a Society with Greater Gender Equality The GEME is a hub and a trigger for collaboration to raise public awareness and spread the idea of gender equality. Interestingly, this collaboration territory has been formed in a multi-structured manner. The primary collaboration boundary can be found at the innermost side, which houses those who are mainly using the GEME as an ‘archive’ of gender equality education contents. This innermost community consists of primary consumers or deliverers who disseminate the contents to the general public, including professional KIGEPE instructors, school teachers, employers at customer service centers of public institutions, policy makers, public officers, content creators. On the other hand, the general public utilizes the GEME as ‘a hub’ outside of this primary boundary (they gain a chance to either directly or indirectly access to the GEME as a result of the cooperation works within the primary boundary). Their visits have induced further spread and sharing of the contents to the outside world. They also have been actively engaging in social network activities and generated a significant amount of synergies with the KIGEPE’s SNS channels in that process. These interactions soon resulted in the creation of the larger, more extensive secondary collaboration boundary located in the middle. The secondary collaboration territory has grown further to embrace not only individual citizens but also private and public institutions, organizations and companies. This massive scale of content sharing and cooperation eventually led to the birth of the final tertiary collaboration boundary. This outermost boundary has been also expanding its domain through an extensive partnership and continuous cooperation with both public and private players, including a variety of central and local governments, networking service providers, and small-, medium-, and large-sized companies who use the platform for internal staff training program.

A Need for Stronger Solidarity and Public Forums to Talk How to Build a Society Free From Gender Inequality According to Korea’s representative gender equality measuring tool called the National Gender Equality Index, the Korean society scored 64.8 out of 100 in 2009 and the number went up to 72.7 in 2016, showing a gradual increase for eight years. In particular, based on more families' understanding the importance of gender equality at home, the ‘Family’ index soared up to 78.0 in 2016. However, the ‘decision-making’ index scored slightly over 25(26.5) or the ‘safety’ index just crossed the halfway mark(64.1). So it is important to understand that these poor scores are not a result of an ‘absolute shortage’ of awareness of gender equality but a consequence of a ‘relative, and temporal deficiency.’ Educating and spreading the idea of gender equality to the public is highly necessary for this reason. The constant public campaigns for women’ empowerment entitled ‘Breaking the Glass Ceiling’ and public discussion events for men about gender equality are some of the examples of such effort. To remove gender inequality from the world, there must be more public forums where people can openly discuss various gender inequality issues and more than anything, denser, well-interwoven networks must be created at the end. In all those processes, the GEME will serve as a key enabler.