From MukBang to EduBang

Can a K-drama inspire an education innovation? When we are Living Digital 2040, it can.

If you are a bona-fide fan of everything Korean, you must have heard of mukbang (Korean: 먹방). In a mukbang, someone broadcasts — usually online — himself or herself eating huge quantities of food.

Mukbang became popular in Korea in the 2010s, and inspired adaptations of the idea. For example, this is a video of Korean actor Ha Jung Woo eating. It is spliced together from different scenes of him tucking into all kinds of yummy dishes, either in the same movie or across different movies.

This video inspired us to conceptualize our artefact-from-the-future “EduBang”. EduBang imagines a future where small and big slices of video content from different videos — but on related topics — can be quickly spliced together to rapidly construct lessons on-the-fly to suit the needs of teachers and students. EduBang makes possible, a Future of Education where learning is increasingly modular, and just-in-time learning and learning-on-demand become more popular.

Read more about this Future of Education and about EduBang in Living Digital 2040: Future of Work, Education, and Healthcare (available from World Scientific Publishing’s website and Amazon at Living Digital 2040: Future Of Work, Education And Healthcare). You can also watch a short concept video of EduBang: Envisioning the Next Generation Video Sharing (see below), which was presented at the Video Showcase of the ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2017.

You can learn a lot from K-drama and food. And yes, we first thought of EduBang over food (a dinner to be specific). How apt.