The Vietnam Foundation President presents success of VOER program at the 3rd Annual Connexions Consortium’s Conference.
Vietnam Foundation President, Kien Pham, and VOER Program Director, Minh Do, returned to Vietnam from the U.S. after participating in the 3rd Annual Connexions Consortium’s conference that was held on February 8th, 2011 at Rice University in Houston, Texas, U.S.A.
At last year’s meeting, Pham spoke about the vision of the open educational resources program in Vietnam. This year, Pham and his team proudly presented the result of 20,000 teaching and researching modules that are uploaded and stored on the Vietnam Open Educational Resources’ website (www.voer.edu.vn). Students, professors, faculty members and all other interested learners in Vietnam can access the educational modules any time any where at no cost. Besides achieving a large number of modules within a year, VOER also successfully developed the Federated Rhaptos software for “content connection”. With this innovative tool, users from any Rhaptos instances can get modules from various sources in Rhaptos World to create new books or lectures. In addition, the Alliance of Vietnam Open Learning Technology, which Vietnam Foundation founded in 2010, now has 137 members. The members of the Alliance of Vietnam Open Learning Technology include enterprises (21%), non-profit organizations (4%), research institutes (17%), universities (52%) and other organizations (6%).
The Vietnam Foundation is committed to improve the educational system in Vietnam with the VOER program. As Pham emphasizes, Vietnam Foundation has put its name on the global Open Educational Resource’s map with VOER. In 2011, Vietnam Foundation aims to bring thousands more modules to VOER. It also hopes that universities in Vietnam start to use VOER’s current modules in their classes. In the future, Vietnam Foundation hopes that VOER will be self-sustained and be managed by and for the Vietnamese people.
