Towards the 3rd decade of the 21st century, UNICEF, Ministry of Education and Training of Vietnam, Vietnamese educators increasingly recognize that children need to be digitally literate; that digital literacy is a growing part of any approach to skills development; existing tools to develop and assess digital literacy place too little emphasis on children; and countries who plan to embrace digital literacy programs should do in a thoughtful manner from a context-driven approach. With support from UNICEF, the Vietnam Ministry of Education is drafting its first ever digital literacy framework with the focus on children.

In this context, UNICEF is granting CFC Vietnam and its technology partners, OMT and EON Reality funding to implement a project in 2020-2021 to develop, test and institutionalize technology-based innovation at pre-school & secondary schools in a number of cities and provinces in Vietnam, starting with Hanoi, Lao Cai, Kon Tum and Dong Thap.

The project aims to empower and support teachers with new approaches to collaborative and adaptive learning in order to yield measurable impacts on learning outcomes of students, focusing on on digital literacy & transferable skills. Ultimately, this project contributes to strengthening of Vietnam’s national capacity to develop and manage inclusive, equitable and quality policies, programs and budgets for the integration of digital literacy and transferable skills into Viet Nam’s education system.

Specifically, the project introduces and builds up capability of teachers in using AVR (Augmented and Virtual Reality, or “extended reality” (XR)) as an innovative tool in preschool (kindergarten) and lower secondary schools to support digital learning in remote areas, with a special focus to ethnic minority girls. The relevance and sustainability of this pilot project will be assessed for introduction of technology elements in teaching and learning in two education levels. From this pilot project, it is expected to provide recommendations for medium-term actions, contributing to the country’s digital literacy framework with the focus on children

More information about this project can be found at:

http://xr.elearn.vn

In Vietnam, concurrently with the implementation of this UNICEF-sponsored pilot program, CFC and OMT also engage teachers, lecturers from the VNU Education University, Vietnam National College for Education, the Olympia Schools, Ta Quang Buu High School, to create Vietnam-specific lessons on the XR Platform for their own classes and for sharing with the Vietnamese teacher community.

Additionally, CFC and OMT are working with an Australian AVR expert team to create an open-source platform for VR-enabled education projects for high school STEM projects.