About

The ICTentr project aims to enhance the relevance of higher education and the employability of higher education students in the field of IT in Vietnam; mainly by providing ICT students with an entrepreneurial mindset, soft skills and a professional attitude when graduating from the university. In order to achieve this and create an impact, the project aims at enhancing Entrepreneurship Education to students and staff in ICT, intensifying development of curricula in the field of ICT, supporting University-Business-Collaboration to enhance the relevance of the curricula and finally to evaluate the universities entrepreneurialism at institution level.

Enhancing Entrepreneurship Education in ICT

The project is to support the development of teaching and learning practices, deliver entrepreneurship education to students and bring entrepreneurialism and innovativeness into teaching. Activities targeted both to students and teachers will develop the entrepreneurial mindset at the Vietnamese partner universities enhancing innovation. Teachers are trained to use entrepreneurial cases as teaching material and they experience new teaching methods while students will actively take part in entrepreneurial courses and extra-curricular activities. Within the project, three activities will be organized in order to achieve the promised objectives:

The Vietnamese partners identify entrepreneurial cases and draft them as study cases to be used as teaching material. They are also provide with training on how to use the developed cases as teaching material. Totally 15 Vietnamese Entrepreneurship study cases are to be published as a book
Business Development Laboratory Project as Extracurricular Activity is created in the Vietnamese partner universities to complement the entrepreneurship courses and to give opportunity to students to practice their new acquired skills.
At the Ho Chi Minh city University of Technology an entrepreneurship pilot course to students is organized with a supporting teacher training in Entrepreneurial Education.

Evaluating the Entrepreneurialism of the Vietnamese HEIs

The Vietnamese partner universities will conduct an evaluation based on the HEInnovate framework initiated by the OECD and the European Commission to determine their level of entrepreneurialism. The evaluation of the Entrepreneurialism is conducted in three prongs:

The objective and process of the HEInnovate framework is introduced to the Vietnamese partners.
The partners collect information on the topics and activities of the innovation and entrepreneurship in their universities and conduct the self-evaluation by the HEInnovate framework.
The European and Vietnamese partners together prepare recommendations on actions to improve the general rate of the Vietnamese partner universities on the HEInnovate framework.

Intensifying Joint Teaching in ICT

To take into consideration the industry-relevant skillset, teachers of ICT will develop their teaching methods through co-creation of material and content, and jointly deliver content with the European partners. Students will put their skills in practice to create and develop new ICT-based business ideas and resolve company specific problems through extracurricular activities and by attending a pilot course in ICT. In order to introduce new teaching material, tools and methods and provide new know-how to the students increasing their ability to work in ICT industry, three activities are undertaken:

Joint Content Development in ICT. European and Vietnamese teachers is formed to share their knowledge of the local teaching practices and develop together the industry-relevant ICT teaching to Vietnamese HEIs.
Pilot Course in ICT to students. Based on the content of an existing ICT course currently conducted at the Vietnamese universities, the Pilot Course introduces new approach increasing the compatibility of teaching and University-Business relations.
Entrepreneurship student organization. The model of Boost Turku, a student organization from Turku, Finland is utilized in developing comparable student organization in the Vietnamese partner universities.

Raising University-Business Collaboration

The project aims at intensifying the collaboration between the universities and the industry through the implementation of a permanent structure at each Vietnamese partner university: the UBC interface. This interface will act as a connecting platform between the university and its community and support different collaboration paths. The raising university-business collaboration follows the following steps:

Seminar on university-business collaboration and benchmark visit in University of Leon, Spain.
Recognizing the needs of the local communities of the Vietnamese universities and identifying existing structure of the university-business collaboration.
Building a business plan for the university-business collaboration interface in each Vietnamese university.
Establishing the university-business collaboration interface.