Event title
How design thinking innovates ICT teaching methods.
Date and location
This event took place on November 14 – 15, 2023 at the Posts and Telecommunications Institute of Technology, Ho Chi Minh City. It had a duration of 2 days.
Participants
The event was attended by 400 lecturers, students, and engineers in ICT and other related technologies from many universities, businesses and local government agencies in Ho Chi Minh City. The interests of participants included how to make IT develop sustainably under the trends of AI, mobile applications, social networks, cloud services, data analytics, blockchain, and digital transformation worldwide.
Description of activities
The event focused on the effective application of design thinking for bringing ICT closer to users. It included 2 plenary sessions and 8 discussion sessions. Following the training events organized by JVN and affiliated universities in the context of project ICT-INOV, the integration of design thinking processes and techniques in courses attracted increasing interest from the ICT community in Ho Chi Minh City. The event highlighted the awareness of stakeholders on the important role that ICT plays in enriching life quality. It further stressed that the focused application of ICT towards innovation and sustainability requires costs containment, increased performance, simpler use in broader contexts, and preparation of students deploy ICT in their future professional roles.
The event started with 2 plenary sessions, which focused on design thinking overview and applications in ICT in general and ICT teaching in particular. These sessions were followed-up by 8 presentations in the morning and in the afternoon, which introduced practical insights and points of view on increasing importance of design thinking in ICT product development and on its effective application. Presentation topics included applying design thinking in developing fintech products, alignment of customer centric and design thinking approaches, and creating ignorable digital content with design thinking.
In the following day, participants joined discussion sessions with a short instruction of design thinking processes and techniques. The audience was familiarized with course material developed in Vietnamese by John Von Neumann Institute with the objective of reaching wide audiences in Vietnam. Each session was led by John Von Neumann Institute project members or an instructor who was trained at previous events. The discussions took place enthusiastically within the spirit of methodological innovation. Many examples and ideas were exchanged, synthesized, and shared with participants, who analyzed similarities and differencies between lecture techniques in earlier verstions of ICT courses and new versions enriched through design thinking, active learning, and gamification.
