Date and location
Two training events were organized at Sai Gon University on July 4th and 5th, 2022 and on July 11th and 12th, 2022 respectively. The event venue is in the city center and easily accessible by educators from different institutions.
Participants
Over 50 instructors attended each of the 2 events. They are the lecturers at universities located in Ho Chi Minh city, including Sai Gon University, HCMC University of Sciences, HCMC University of Education, HCMC University of Technology, and Von Neumann Institute. They all showed their desire to become familiar with the ICT-INOV learning methodology for improving their teaching skills and methods.
Description of activities
In the 1st day of each event the audience was familiarized on a high level with overall design thinking processes and techniques. Participants engaged in a discussion on how the design thinking process and techniques can be applied in ICT higher education to promote innovation and course effectiveness.
In the 2nd day, participants practiced design thinking on applying ICT in educational environments. The purpose of the activities was to demonstrate how to apply design thinking to solve problems during courses in the context of problem-based learning for the benefit of participating lecturers and also for the benefit of students.
During the training sessions, instructors were asked to solve the problem of building new ICT services for a smart university.They were split into 6 groups of 8 to 10 individuals. At first, participants formed teams based on their common viewpoints or interests regarding the topic. However, the organizers considered that teams would be more effective if they represented multiple viewpoints. For this reason, participants were reassigned to teams randomly.
In the resulting teams, members were naturally not familiar with each other. They engaged in mini games for team building purposes and for breaking the ice before engaging in design thinking steps, such as problem discovery, empathy, problem redefinition, ideation, idea selection, prototyping, and evaluation. Each group presented their ideas, alternative potential solutions, and selected solution for prototyping and received feedback from the entire group. Team members drew their suggested solution on paper as a form of low fidelity prototype. Finally, participants discussed under the supervision of Von Neumann Institute’ presenter how to tailor the process to adapt it to different contexts in classes and subjects.
The materials that are provided by the ICT-INOV project were translated into Vietnamese for ease of use by all participants. It would be useful for further application in the universities for both lecturers and students who may not have a working knowledge of English.
