Strategic Thrust 1: Governance and Regulations

First and foremost, for digital transformation to succeed, leaders must have a clear vision of where they want their organizations to be and also a good understanding of how to get there. the National Committee on Education and Training Innovation should assist the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) in formulating and implementing national guidelines and training programmes that are aligned with the government’s overarching mandates and regulations.

Second, the committee should also take on the role of a central coordinator, to assist MOET in communicating the specific goals and objectives of the program and its associated performance indicators, such as digital competency ratings of students and educators, user satisfaction levels and Information Communication Technology (ICT) utilization rate.

Third, the committee should be empowered to conduct an independent and transparent program review, with the objective of evaluating the criteria of appropriateness, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the national program and its subcomponents.

Fourth, the committee could also be given the authority to take on the role of audit and enforcement on behalf of MOET. This would be useful in ensuring compliance with government regulations and requirements that are must- haves, which can include basic ICT literacy training programmes that are compulsory for all students and educators in HEIs.

Strategic Thrust 2: Campaign

Fast-forward to 2021, the rise of the digital era has made digital literacy akin to word literacy skills. However, general awareness of the need for ICT training and the perceived benefits of online learning have remained low, as shown by our survey results. Therefore, it is timely for them to roll out a Digital Literacy Campaign. In particular, the campaign should create a mindset of embracing OL and receptivity to ICT training so as to enhance their capacity in adopting the OL and narrow the learning gaps caused by the COVID-19. In the long-term, the Vietnam government should also consider a wider national campaign that includes the digital literacy training into the curriculum of primary schools, so as to lay down a strong foundation for the future generations beyond COVID- 19. The key campaign objective is to improve the perceived benefits of online education for the stakeholders: Administrators, Educators, Students.

Strategic Thrust 3: Benchmarking tool for objective evaluation and tracking

To facilitate this process, we have developed the Digital Readiness Benchmarking (DRB) framework with a focus on five key transformation elements. This framework is adapted from the European Commission Guideline on Promoting Effective Digital-Age Learning 2015. Each transformation element includes descriptors that provide further clarity on the specific requirements that need to be met to effect the transformation. This framework can either be administered directly by the National Committee under its role of program evaluation, or used by individual institutions to self-assess their digital readiness, with specific performance indicators reported to the committee for progress tracking. Details of the five transformation elements are elaborated below.

Strategic Thrust 4: Training

Our literature review on overseas best practices in countries like Singapore clearly shows that successful digital transformation is underpinned by investments in training and continuous learning. Studies on other digitally mature countries also emphasized continuing professional development as a key requirement for digital-age learning. However, the role of training has remained one of the most overlooked aspects in digital transformation as studies have shown that most organizations are not prepared to keep up with their staff’s training and development needs. We postulate this training gap to be the main cause for the perceived poor OL environment, due to the lack of technical know-how in optimizing interactions between educators and students. As such, in order to achieve more comprehensive, consistent and sustainable learning outcomes, we recommend for the National Committee to develop a set of national training standards with the following features for educators and students in Vietnam’s higher education.

Among above recommendations, he emphasized: "Regarding policy design and implementation, it is necessary to carry out synchronously all 4 recommendations (4 promotive strategies), however, the recommendation in the 3rd strategy on Benchmarking has the biggest spillover effects on improving stakeholders’ awareness and strategy.”