Introducing Minh Do

“Next in our series of introductions of the members of the Connexions Consortium Technology Committee, I am delighted to introduce Minh Do, the director of a team that was one of the first to embrace Connexions and Enterprise Rhaptos internationally. The Vietnam Foundation has been working with Connexions and running Rhaptos in Vietnam since 2006 and they have been pioneers in the areas of internationalization, proxy caching, language support in PDF generation, customization, training and local support for Rhaptos. Their vision for a 21^st century education in Vietnam is inspiring and their commitment unwavering. Minh and his team have been trusted advisors in the development of Enterprise Rhaptos and they have been key beta testers for new features in the software, offering their time on short notice and helping ensure quality."
Kathi Fletcher -- Technology Director and Project Manager at Connexions

I am Minh Do and I am the Vietnam Open Education Resources (VOER) Program Director at the Vietnam Foundation (VNF). My background is in eLearning, open course ware, and information technology. Before joining the VNF, I was the Vietnam Open Course Ware Program Manager for the Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF). And prior to that, I was the Deputy Director of the Center for e-Learning and Online Testing Technology at the Information Technology Institute (ITI) at the Vietnam National University in Hanoi (VNU Hanoi). There, I coordinated the "in-country training course," for the second phase of the "Vietnam Information Technology Training Project" hosted by JICA Japan and VNU Hanoi.

My involvement with Connexions began in June 2006 at the CNX training workshop at VNU Hanoi. I met Hung Tran from the VEF technical team and Rich Baraniuk, Sidney Burrus, and Chuck Bearden from the CNX team. I was impressed by the software features and the LEGO idea and kept in touch from that time on.

My e-Learning center collaborated with the VEF team to increase the Open Coursware (OCW) activities in Vietnam by installing a version of Rhaptos in Vietnam and training users how to use Rhaptos to create and share their knowledge. We volunteered to translate the Rhaptos interface into Vietnamese and I myself went around the country with Hung Tran to set up the caching servers to prepare for the launching of the VOCW Program. Day by day, I got more and more deeply involved in VOCW. Finally, I decided to fully join the VEF team and lead the program with Hung Tran.

The transition from VOCW to VOER is quite a long story, but now, let’s talk about where VOER is heading with its “3 development legs” model (Technology, Content, and Community):

• Technology Development: Having an innovative, reliable, and inexpensive platform plays a vital role for any OER project. Thanks to the release of Enterprise Rhaptos (ER) from Connexions, we were able to deploy a robust software platform for VOER with a major data center located in Hanoi. The VOER website is now available for free public access from the Internet. We are also cooperating with an open source development company named NextG Solutions. NextG specializes in Zope/Plone solutions and will test and customize ER, and develop more functions for ER as the community needs. A support center named Connexcent (Asia-Pacific Connexions Support Center) was established under the umbrella of the VNF in order to provide best practices and support services to the regional community in particular and the global community in general.

• Content Development: Besides the technology, content is the heart of VOER. To provide the seed content for the project, we aimed to collect teaching materials from various sources and make them available on the VOER website. Connexions Rhaptos makes the usage of textbooks more effective by dividing a textbook into independent parts, or modules, and allowing combination of modules from different textbooks to create a new one. In the first year of VOER, we plan to publish 20,000 modules on Rhaptos. The first source of available textbooks is a library of 1000 textbooks from MOET (Ministry of Education and Training). Other sources include universities, companies, and research institutions. After just a few months working with these organizations, we have around 10,000 modules available in VOER.

• Community Development: The last leg makes the project sustainable. We are in the process of building the community for VOER by cooperating with our partners in technology development and content production, providing training to students and faculty members on using and sharing content, and sharing information about VOER with the public. At the moment we have established the Alliance for Vietnam Open Learning Technologies (VOLT); VOLT has early members from important entities in Vietnam such as FPT (the largest technology company in the country), the Institute of Sociology (the leading research on sociology in the country), the Online Management Training Company, the Center for Promotion of Advancement of Society (a non-profit organization, belonging to the Vietnam Union of Science and Technology Associations) and the Hanoi Obstetrics And Gynecology Hospital (the leading and first-of-its-kind hospital in Reproductive Health Care in Hanoi). Members of this community are now using customized versions of Enterprise Rhaptos to create and share knowledge both internally and externally. In addition, we have won participation commitments from major universities in Vietnam such as the University of Danang, the University of Education, and the Vietnam National University in Hanoi and HoChiMinh City.

Based on my experience with VOER, as a Connexions Consortium Technology Committee member, I really want to help accelerate all the “3 development legs” activities for both Connexions and Rhaptos. The software needs to be more user-friendly, more flexible to customize, as well as able to handle large amounts of uploading and sharing. The community needs expansion beyond individuals to organizations like universities or institutes, because the number of users will determine the success of CNX. Besides that, content on different Rhaptos instances should be linked together to help people use modules and collections more flexibly and easily. As I am focusing on the development of Enterprise Rhaptos, I hope our technology team will be instrumental in the very near future in designing and implementing a way to link all the needed modules from any Rhaptos repository into collections.

Please visit the links below to see more about what we are doing.

• The Vietnam Foundation: www.vnfoundation.org
• The Vietnam Open Educational Resources Program website: www.voer.edu.vn