BID Develops ICT Education in Vietnam
ICTEDU project supports Vietnam’s national goal of becoming a knowledge economy by the year 2020. At the University of Turku, altogether four ongoing projects funded by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland are involved in enhancing higher education capacity in developing countries.
Project Manager Kirsi Peura and Vice-Dean Pham Huy Hoang (Hanoi University of Science and Technology) discussed the Finnish innovation funding system. Vietnam doesn't have funding infrastructure, which slows down commercialising ICT research in the country.
Business and Innovation Development (BID) unit coordinates a development cooperation project, which aims to support Vietnam’s national development goals by enhancing higher education in ICT by improving the relevance of education and employment opportunities of students.
‒ As is usual in development cooperation, the project focuses in the needs of the target organisation, says Project Manager Kirsi Peura.
The partner universities in the project are Hanoi University of Science and Technology and the University of Danang. In the project, the partners together create a study module focusing on enhancing the students’ preparedness to initiate business in the field of ICT and become entrepreneurs. BID also offers training for the teachers of the partner universities in Vietnam. In addition, BID reviews the quality of an existing ICT study programme in Hanoi.
One of the goals of the cooperation is to advance ICT innovation in Vietnam and strengthen the universities’ industry relations. The partner universities' representatives visited the University of Turku in December in order to get to know the Finnish innovation system. Pham Huy Hoang, Vice-Dean of Hanoi University of Science and Technology, says that it was especially fruitful to learn how Finnish universities’ do industry cooperation. The visitors were also interested in the financing models and internal project and innovation services at the University of Turku.
‒ We are interested in transferring good practices to Vietnam, but institutional and cultural differences in our operational environments must be taken into consideration: we have to apply the practices into our own country, Pham Huy Hoang says.
The University of Turku Fosters Four Higher Education Development Cooperation Projects
At the University of Turku, there are altogether four ongoing projects funded by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland that are involved in enhancing higher education capacity in developing countries. The projects develop universities in Peru, Tanzania, and Southeast Asia.
Department of Geography and Geology carries out a project related to geographic information in Tanzania, Functional Foods Forum develops the partner universities’ food industry relations in Peru, and Finland’s Futures Research Centre runs a project called SUCCEED in Southeast Asia, which enhances and promotes climate change and renewable energy education, research, and development at the partner universities.
Taru Suhonen