On the threshold of the Year of the Ox 2021, the Vietnam Education Newspaper has had an interview with Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyen Ngoc Vu – President of the University of Danang (UD), about his vision and expectations for the UD’s development.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyen Ngoc Vu - President of the UD.

We kindly introduce the main points of this interview as follows:

Reporter: In 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic has spread, many localities including Danang city had to implement “lockdown”, “social distancing”. So, what obstacles and difficulties have the UD’s member universities encountered and how they have overcome?

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyen Ngoc Vu: 2020 was a very special and unprecedented year when Danang had to implement social distancing twice, then suffered from storms and floods,…

In that context, like other universities, the UD faced many difficulties in in-person training of students. However, with the efforts to quickly adapt to the new situation, the UD issued regulations on the implementation and quality assurance of online teaching and learning.

On the basis of this regulation, our member universities implemented online teaching – learning to achieve the goal of “not going to school but not stop learning and teaching”. The results focused on quality assurance and application of new technologies.

Besides, the Covid-19 pandemic nearly halted the student exchange, international cooperation, and technology transfer. In response to this problem, the UD’s member universities strongly implemented the digital transformation for online training, virtual workshops, virtual signing ceremonies of MOUs.

Recently, in Hanoi, the Ministry of Education and Training and the Ministry of Information and Communications have jointly organized a conference that defined universities must be at the forefront in implementing digital transformation. Therefore, the UD is in the process of establishing a Steering Committee for Digital Transformation to help the university to join the two ministries’ above-mentioned project.

The UD's students applied technology in learning.

Reporter: 2021 will be the first year to implement the Resolution of the XIII Party Congress. There are important issues of education and training in the Resolution. What are your expectations and proposals on mechanisms and policies for higher education development?

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyen Ngoc Vu: As a delegate of the XIII Party Congress, I had the opportunity to thoroughly study the Political Report which clearly stated that “(Vietnam) must transform the economic model in the direction of digital business, digital society,…”. In particular, science and technology must be the main driving forces in the process of economic model transformation, while high-quality human resource training is one of three breakthroughs for national development.

I strongly believe that the Congress Resolution will come into life. As a delegate, I also actively participated in reviewing documents on a number of issues that still concern the society.

Firstly, re-planning universities network to form large, multi-disciplinary universities;

Secondly, re-planning network of pedagogical and medical universities in a reasonable way to avoid unqualifed large-scale training;

Thirdly, re-organizing the State management on science and technology resources;

Lastly, the State needs to create mechanisms and policies to encourage the development of private universities/colleges. At the same time, it is necessary to strengthen the State’s inspection and supervision to improve the quality of private institutions.

Reporter: Thank you for your sharing!