Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Manh Hung said at a working session with the Hanoi and HCM City National Universities that Vietnam needs many applied digital engineers to speed up national digital transformation, industrialization and modernization.

About 150,000 IT and digital engineers are needed in Vietnam each year, while the existing workforce can satisfy only 40-50 percent. 

Vietnam needs 5,000-10,000 engineers in the semiconductor industry each year, while only 20 percent can be met.

Digital university is the answer to the question about how to prepare the digital workforce in Vietnam.

Multi-billion dollar digital training market

Quach Thanh Hai, head of the training division from the HCM City University of Technology and Education, said digital education and digital university is applied by countries with leading education sectors.

He cited a report as saying that the revenue from digital education globally may reach $103.8 billion this year, 62.5 percent of which comes from digital university education. Digital training helps save up to 50 percent of training cost per student per credit.

The university has been trying digital training models over the last 10 years.

“Since 2014, we have been deploying digital teaching with LMS (learning management system), creating favorable conditions for lecturing staff to apply more advanced teaching models, including project-based learning, work-based learning by doing, and blended learning. Also, the solutions on digitizing documents and management have been applied,” he said.

Since 2018, the university has been providing online training courses by developing Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on the basis of UTEx researched and developed by the school.

The system allows students to register learning models together with the MOOCs courses on other popular learning platforms, with self-learning time accounting for 70-80 percent of total time of modules.

HCM City Open University is known as the pioneer in providing online training. In 2016, the online training program for bachelor’s degree was officially launched after a long period of preparation, together with the establishment of the online training center..

“LMS 3.5, the modern online learning system, together with the training curriculum designed in accordance with the international standards of Quality Matters, have helped learners to implement their desire of learning anytime and anywhere,” Ha said.

Three years later, the school activated the blended learning model for full-time students.

With the teaching models, the school ensured uninterrupted study during Covid-19. Lecturers provided lectures via LMS and video conference software with consensus from students.

Later, the university built VMOOCs (Vietnam Massive Open Online Courses), providing free public open online training courses in Vietnam.

The ‘heart’ of a digital university is ‘digital training’ and ‘digital administration’

According to To Van Phuong from Nha Trang University, the two key sectors for the school to focus on is digital training and digital administration. The former means shifting training activities from face-to-face mode to digital environment. 

At present, the school is organizing the training at two levels – blended learning and e-learning.

“We develop digital training courseware so that students can access the learning materials from a distance. We have also developed a digital library,” Phuong said.

The Vietnam Aviation Academy has also gradually built adigital university. Tran Hoai An, Chair of the School Council, said there are two things that need to be done to build a digital university -  building digital management and administration tools, and building digital data about learning materials. The academy uses digital management tools on Base, a digital transformation platform.

The heart of digital governance is a system of legal and internal regulations and rules; standardized processes (ISO) which are digitized and included in digital transformation software.

In the case of the HCM City University of Technology, Rector Tran Thien Phuc said the school began digitization in 2007 with the establishment of the educational resources called BK E-Learning. At first, the educational material store just comprised lectures, lecturing materials such as books and newspapers.

In 2018, the school set up E-Learning where students could learn in groups and exchange information.

When Covid-19 broke out, the school continued to accelerate online classes as students could not go to school. At that time, the 22 studios were lecture halls at which lecturers and students continued their studies.

Le Huyen