The Vietnamese OpenCourseWare

According to Stephen Downes, The Vietnamese OpenCourseWare site was launched December 12, 2007. VOCW, the Vietnam OpenCourseWare - is a joint project among the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) of Vietnam, the Vietnam Software and Media Company (VASC) and the Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF) to make opencourseware (OCW) materials easily and freely to the Vietnamese including university faculty members, students and self-learners.

VOCW partners at the Signing Ceremony of the Memorandum of Understanding on OpenCourseWare in VietnamSince its inception in 2002 by MIT, OCW has been widely used by educators and learners all over the world and becoming the world model of education. Conceptually, it aims to create a vast network of universities around the world offering open access to high-quality educational materials in a variety of different disciplines, in a variety of different languages, creating a global web of knowledge that will improve education around the world. Many other universities in the U.S. such as Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, Tufts University and Utah States University also have their own OCW available online. Other countries namely Japan and China successfully established their national OCW programs. The objective of VOCW is to promote the OCW usage in Vietnam and widen the linkages between Vietnamese universities and leading universities around the world. Strategically, OCW will be an important tool to advance education of Vietnam toward the international level. Initially, it starts with MIT OCW, the most prestigious at present. In the future, other OCW will be made available subsequently. With a mirror site of MIT OCW hosted at VASC, the Vietnamese users now can easily and quickly access materials of more than 1,200 courses. Apparently, this is a huge source of materials that available online. Both faculty members and students can access and learn from them. Importantly, the educators can select and modify courses appropriately to the level of their students. As a result, it will help modernize the teaching as well as learning methods and upgrade higher education quality at universities.

http://vocw.vef.gov/