Canadian universities send students to study in Vietnam, why?

Students studying at Vancouver Island University – Photo: VIU STUDENT AFFAIRS

That is what Dr. Deborah Saucier, president of Vancouver Island University (Canada), shared with Tuoi Tre newspaper reporters during her business trip to Ho Chi Minh City.

More and more Canadian students come to Vietnam

* In Ho Chi Minh City, you just had a very good article about the trend of Vietnamese students studying abroad in Canada. However, you also mentioned that many Canadian students come to Vietnam to study?

– Vietnamese students are always welcomed by our school because of their ability and enthusiasm. However, I would like to share another interesting thing.

Nowadays, more and more groups of Canadian students come to Vietnam to study. Overcoming the geographical distance, they are studying in exchange programs from a few weeks to a few months in Ho Chi Minh City, Can Tho, Tra Vinh ...

At first, our students were very nervous about going far away, especially to an Asian country. They were afraid because they could not speak Vietnamese. But after arriving in Vietnam, many of them felt very familiar.

Right in the first meals, many students exclaimed: Oh my god, I ate this when I was a kid in Canada . Or when Vietnamese teachers introduced fish sauce, warning students that this sauce had a strong smell. But then it turned out that some Canadian students also said that they had a bottle of fish sauce at home.

That means you feel that in Vietnam, there are some things that are familiar to your life in Canada. But of course there are still many differences to discover . First of all, the language, then the transportation, then the study program, the culture… Our students love Vietnam very much.

* That's surprising. Why is your university so interested in sending students to Vietnam, madam?

– One of the things we learned during the pandemic is that the supply chain is global. And countries like Vietnam remain an important link in that chain.

So ineducation , every school, every lecturer, every student, from engineering, business to healthcare in Vietnam is also a link in the global education network and there are many interesting things for us to learn. There, students and lecturers from Western countries can still expand their knowledge and perspectives on many issues.

With our students, you participate in many engineering and research projects in Vietnam. They also spend a lot of time collaborating with Vietnamese students, and participate in many student activities.

Finally, you realize that we do not have only one way to solve the problem from the Western perspective. That is also what we always want to teach students, a problem has many ways to solve.

AI application problem

* Universities in Vietnam are talking a lot about applying artificial intelligence (AI) in training and management. At your school in particular and at schools in Canada in general, what is the mindset towards approaching the AI wave?

– Think about it, after a course, which is more important: do you need students to understand the lesson or do you need students to write a final report? If the goal is to understand more about a particular topic, applying AI is not a problem. Let's teach students how to evaluate from the inside, which is to understand and apply the lesson.

There is no denying that AI is a very, very useful tool. It is no different than our smartphones. Even in the school president's office, we use AI. My daughter is in high school now. In her 12th grade English class, they are also asked to use AI to evaluate English sentences generated by AI.

At our university, professors are given the freedom to decide whether they want to use AI in the classroom. But the one thing is certain: whether professors allow it or not, students are using it.

So teachers can come up with smarter problems for their students. I know a teacher at my school who was initially frustrated with students using AI to solve math problems. Then he gave them a reverse problem, which meant he gave them multiple AI solutions and then asked them to find errors in the AI’s own solutions. So they could still use AI intelligently.

Universities in Vietnam are changing very quickly.

* Having a lot of experience working with universities in Vietnam, have you noticed any changes in the schools in recent years?

– Observing Vietnamese universities, in just a short time, I see that the schools have changed very quickly. The most obvious thing is the number and the programs that universities are offering. You may have noticed this too, in recent years Vietnamese universities have opened many more majors and training programs.

First of all, I look at it from a positive perspective. Young people now have many options to pursue their favorite majors, which are very diverse and rich. This trend is also suitable for universities in developed countries when building universities into multi-disciplinary and multi-field schools. In the future, I think this number can grow exponentially.

But developing too many programs also brings difficulties. For example, our school currently has about 120 programs, but some of them have only two or three professors.

When you spread yourself thin, you have to accept the challenge of thin resources. Therefore, I think Vietnamese universities should also pay a lot of attention to this, have a strategy to combine resources to ensure the quality of teaching and research in the coming time.

Dr. Deborah Saucier was appointed president of Vancouver Island University in July 2019. Dr. Saucier holds a PhD in psychology from the University of Western Ontario, and a BA and MA in psychology from the University of Victoria.

Vancouver Island University is a public university, ranked in the top 50 in Canada. The main campus is located in Nanaimo, with regional campuses in Duncan and Powell River.

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/truong-dai-hoc-canada-dua-sinh-vien-sang-viet-nam-hoc-vi-sao-20241020102250526.htm