The men aged 25 to 34 all studied at universities in South Korea, met each other by chance and became close friends after extracurricular activities. They share a common interest in education projects. 

The opportunity for them to start their project came in September 2015, when Nguyen Van Trung, who has a PhD in Computer Science from Australian National University, suggested developing an open education project for university and higher education levels. 

Seven young Vietnamese have created Kien Hoc, an education project and website which will provide lectures from the world’s leading universities to Vietnamese users, free of charge.

The most outstanding characteristics of the project are international quality, localization and no fee.

The men want to remove barriers in language and cost that prevent many people from study opportunities and give more Vietnamese access to the world’s leading education systems.

At first, many problems were raised about the not-for-profit project. But they quickly came to a decision to choose the project to start their business.

After consulting experts on different issues, from technical issues to copyright, they could figure out a way for the project to operate. They began building a website and choosing documents to translate.

The two sources of documents for training are from prestigious schools in the world with licenses and well-known Youtube channels on education.

In October 2015, the team began looking for voluntary translators. Many volunteers then contacted the team. They were students from foreign and domestic universities, who were encouraged by the project’s significance. 

Meanwhile, the advisors tried to spend as much time as they could to help develop Kien Hoc. The team received support from Microsoft which could ease the burden on the server.

To be sure that training documents were useful, the management board only accepted ones with high quality, while the English-Vietnamese translation works were checked very thoroughly.

At first, the project developers targeted learners who could not speak English. However, now it attracts students with good English skills as well.

 Kien Hoc encourages interactions and discussions among learners to avoid passive learning and the courses are designed with subtitles in Vietnamese.

To date, Kien Hoc has introduced 20 training courses with hundreds of thousands of lecture views, attracting 11,000 students. The team plans to raise the figures to 50 courses and 30,000 learners in 2017.