What happened
South Korea planned to test its new AI digital textbooks in classrooms before introducing them across the school system. That pilot did not happen.
It was reported that the Ministry of Education announced in January 2023 that the textbooks would be introduced from 2025. The original plan was to run a pilot in 2024 and then introduce them in stages. But the state auditor found the ministry worked on the basis that the 2025 start date could not change.
In February 2023, the pilot was replaced with a classroom review planned for September 2024 to February 2025. Development then ran three months late, leaving even less time to see how the textbooks worked in actual classrooms.
The Board of Audit and Inspection examined what happened at the request of the National Assembly. In 2025, according to Newsis, schools could decide for themselves whether to use the textbooks.
What an auditable version would have shown
It was reported that the delay cut the classroom review to December 2024 to February 2025, including the school holidays. The auditor found teachers were not in a position to properly use the textbooks in class. Instead, the review became mainly a check for wording errors and whether the systems worked properly.
The problem became clearer once the textbooks reached schools that chose to use them. It was reported that between March and May 2025, 72.8 percent of first-year high school English students at those schools did not use them once. Across the grades and subjects examined, an average of 60.0 percent did not use them. Just 8.1 percent used them on ten or more days.
There was also a problem with the order in which the programme was built. It was reported that development guidelines were issued in August 2023 before the technical standards were ready. Publishers later had to redesign their systems after the standards arrived after December 2024. Officials told the auditor this “could not be helped” because the approval process had to begin in August 2023 to meet the 2025 introduction.
Where the gap was
The auditor also found weaknesses in the approval process itself. It was reported that copies being reviewed were held on the publishers’ own cloud systems. Of the 13 publishers examined, 12 kept no access logs and none kept change logs. That meant suspected changes could not be checked afterwards.
It was also reported that publisher names were visible in some review copies. Four publishers whose names appeared still passed without a misconduct review. The Korea Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Creativity did not refer six suspected-change reports logged by reviewers for a misconduct review.
The ministry said there was “no problem at all” with replacing the pilot. It was reported that the auditor did not accept that position. It pointed to the earlier generation of digital textbooks, which had been piloted for four years.
A ConstraintGate is designed to check an action against declared rules, such as a requirement to pilot before a national rollout, and to require a recorded approval to go ahead without it.
A MetricRecord keeps signed figures, such as classroom use, that a ministry, auditor or parliament can check.
ConstraintGate and MetricRecord are Headlights designs.
What governance should have looked like
It was reported that the auditor found six instances of illegality or impropriety and issued six caution requests. Five went to the Minister of Education and one to the head of the Korea Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Creativity. These were caution requests, not sanctions on individuals.
In August 2025, before the audit report, it was reported that the National Assembly changed the law so AI digital textbooks were classed as educational materials rather than textbooks.
For a new technology introduced across a national school system, best practice would be to test it properly in classrooms, set technical standards before development begins, and keep a record of every change made to the version being reviewed.
Failure Pattern: according to the state auditor, the ministry treated the start date for AI textbooks as fixed, dropped the planned pilot and cut the classroom review short, and said there was no problem.
Governance Principle: a national AI rollout in schools should be tested in classrooms first, and a fixed date should not be a reason to skip the test.
The reference implementation of ConstraintGate and MetricRecord is open source. It lives at github.com/saffronandindia/headlights-oss, Apache 2.0 licensed and free to install. The repository is public now.
Sources
- AI디지털교과서 도입 관련 (국회감사요구), audit report and press release (Board of Audit and Inspection of Korea, December 2025)
- Catalogue record for the audit report (National Assembly Library)
- AI교과서 ‘학교별 선택’ 취소해야 발행사 소송, 1심서 각하 (Newsis, 23 July 2026)
- AI 디지털 교과서 이용료 고시 취소 소송 각하 (Newsis, 14 August 2026)