Leveraging Classrooms with OER in Vietnam
Overview
During past 20 years, OCW/OER movement has had global impact since the educational resources are shared for free on the Internet. Logically, developing countries like Vietnam should get the best from OCW/OER as they are free to use the high quality and up-to-date materials from well-known universities and research institutions in the developed countries. However, the differences in learning and teaching methodologies as well as the language barrier make it difficult to adopt open resources. Therefore, it is necessary for each OCW/OER adopter to develop a suitable model to fit with specific situations.
Author
Minh Do Information Technology Institute, Vietnam National University Website: http://iti.vnu.edu.vn Email: Minhdn@vnu.edu.vn
BACKGROUND
During past 20 years, OCW/OER movement has had global impact since the educational resources are shared for free on the Internet. Logically, developing countries like Vietnam should get the best from OCW/OER as they are free to use the high quality and up-to-date materials from well-known universities and research institutions in the developed countries. However, the differences in learning and teaching methodologies as well as the language barrier make it difficult to adopt open resources. Therefore, it is necessary for each OCW/OER adopter to develop a suitable model to fit with specific situations.
In Vietnam, we have been developing a community driven national scale OER program, Vietnam Open Educational Resources (VOER). We are cooperating with Vietnamese government entities like Ministry of Education and Training as well as with international partners like Rice University, U.S.A. to make VOER as an integral part of the education reform process in Vietnam. To archive that goal, we divide the development of VOER into multiple phrases: content and infrastructure development, community development and classroom integration, and expansion.
Last years, we successfully accomplished our first phase. We built our content repository based on Rice Connexions Rhaptos platform. More importantly, we developed approximately 20,000 content modules and make them readily available in our repository for open access. In the next couple of years, we aim to bring VOER content into classroom usage at Vietnamese universities and research institutions. This paper presents our idea and action plan to reach our goals.
CHALLENGES
Content
The first challenge we may face is to develop suitable content for Vietnam’s context. As we mentioned before, there are couple of differences in teaching and learning ways together with the language barrier that prevent us from using available OER directly. In fact, there were some attempts to host a mirror site of MIT OpenCourseWare project in Vietnam for Vietnamese users but they did not succeed. As a result, the content for VOER is not only high quality and up-to-date but also suitable and usable in Vietnam’s context.
People
Another challenge we are encounter is to change habits of utilizing OER of our users who are researchers, teachers, students, and self-learners. Currently, VOER serves as a reference repository for Vietnamese users. However, to really make a breakthrough in education reforming in Vietnam, VOER needs to be integrated in classroom’s activities where teachers and students are the main players. Therefore, it is extremely important to change their habits of making use of OER and technologies. This a big challenge as many teachers, even teachers in the U.S. still prefer the traditional way of using textbooks for their class. The advent of ebooks helps reduce the textbook expenses; however the usage tradition remains the same while OER and accompanied technologies provide teachers and students with much more convenience. In addition, sometimes the bureaucratic management systems slow down or even prevent the adoption of new learning and teaching methodologies.
Technology and Support
Technologies play a critical role in the development of OCW/OER around the world as we have witnessed over last 10 years. To have a wide coverage for VOER, we had to build our infrastructure based on the technologies that not only provide much functionality but also are easy to use, especially in Vietnam where Internet has just become popular in recent years. Some university professors recognize the potential impact of OER on the education system and they are willing to contribute their content to the repository. However, there are still some difficulties in term of technology to make their content readily available on VOER website, for example, some old content was created using the old character set standards which are not compatible with the current Unicode ones. Another example is that, for older generations of teachers, it is rare to register an account and write their courses online by combining available content instead of making the new one even though the system fully supports those activities.
OUR APPROACH
Given above goals and challenges, in this section, we briefly describe our approach as well as the small scale experiments to overcome the difficulties.
Content
Our approach to build VOER content repository is to use social-based model where everyone in the community can contribute, use, adapt and reuse content. By using this model we hope that once we get the involvement of the community, the content repository will be filled quickly with wide coverage of multiple disciplines. We aim to make VOER as high quality, up-to-date, easy to use and reuse, free of charge educational resources. To foster the usage of VOER, we initially develop the seed content as the good examples for other to use, adapt and reuse. We invite the renowned university professors and educators to participate in the development of seed content. For example, Professor Nguyen Van Hieu, Professor Nguyen Lan Dung, and Professors Dinh Dung who are the leading scientists in physics, biology and mathematics provide us with their textbooks used many classrooms to make them available online on VOER. Or Professor Minh Do created his entirely DSP course in VOER when he taught for a DSP summer school in Vietnam. Also, we sent our volunteer to record and take notes during lectures for advanced program class in Computer Science at Hanoi University of Technology by Professor James Cremer.
People
Providing necessary resources to help VOER users specifically teachers and students is our top priority in the next phase of VOER development as we identify that they are the ones to make our program success. At macro level, we are working with Vietnamese government agencies like Ministry of Education and Training to create the government policies to encourage the adoption of OER in learning and teaching activities. We are also cooperating with the management of universities to create the local policies on OER. At micro level, we are working directly with professors, instructors to provide hand on training on how to use VOER tools and content to design syllabus and develop textbooks for their courses. In addition, we provide training to students how to utilize the functionality of VOER for their studying.
To encourage users to use VOER in their daily work, we also provide financial support. For example, we sponsored for summer school of DSP Academy where oversea Vietnamese professors came to Vietnam to teach DSP courses. All the materials for the school are posted in VOER repository. In addition, we are going to sponsor for the nationwide contest in VOER application in classrooms to award the brightest ideas for content development or content and tool usage.
Technology and Support
In VOER, technologies play a very important role in content development and delivery. We are working with Rice Connexions team as well as with our local partners to continually improve our technology platform. Specifically, we are developing a piece of software named Federate Rhaptos which allows our users to pull content from other OER repositories around the world to create their textbooks. For example, Professor Minh Do used over 10 modules from both Rice Connexions and VOER to develop his DSP course. In addition, we are expanding our datacenter with more robust hardware to server more people at faster speed. Last but not least, with the advent of table devices like iPad and Android based devices as well as the surprisingly low cost 3G services makes it easier than ever to deliver OER content to wide range of users. We are developing VOER software for those tablet and mobile devices so users can access to VOER content conveniently anywhere and anytime.
In addition, we are providing technology support for universities, publishers, libraries and individuals to convert their content in large volume into VOER modules. Our Print-on-demand service is helping people to print out the electronic version to the printed textbook with a color cover, high quality printing and very low cost (2 USD /a textbook 50 pages)
INITIAL RESULTS
Content Development and Content Usage
Figure 1: Content Development
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a) Visitors per month |
| b) Monthly pages accessed |
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c) Number of hits per month |
| d) Monthly bandwidth usage |
Figure 2: VOER usage
Community Development
Figure 3: Community Development
Technology Development
Figure 4: VOER infrastructure