Open Course Ware (OCW), along with multimedia, has long been considered necessary for High School education all over the world as well as that of Vietnam in the globalisation era. OCW helps train and re-train teachers, accelerating development and career participation among them.
Developing OCW is new in high school education.
According to M.Sc Phuong Hung Minh Tran (Vinh University), OCW source is vital for teachers, social sciences and natural sciences are more informative than in textbooks, adding new knowledge of the theory that textbooks mention, generalize or haven’t mentioned yet in an all-inclusive way, approaches particular teaching methods of building syllabus, lessons in class, builds assessment tests in a comrehensive way.
Today, developing OCW is only being deployed in universities in Vietnam, while being new to high school education. Teachers’ knowledge is limited and sometimes out-of-date due to their previous training. Hence, training and re-training teachers on social and natural sciences which update new knowledge for the curriculum and textbooks is actually necessary.
Essential for a learning society
M.Sc Phuong Hung Minh Tran believes that teacher plays an important role in education. Thus, training and re-training is vital. Adaptability, self change and content correction of OCW assist teachers, pedagogical students to use and apply into individual education environment.
Besides, OCW also creates an interactive environment between teachers and learners, helping them form a positive attitude towards learning, direct and creative, and form learners’ characteristics.
“The process of intaking OCW in high school will have several difficulties and challenges at first, especially in training and re-training teachers on social and natural sciences. To run the program, textbooks are updated but what matters is each teacher, each school and pedagocgical school need to have the same educational purpose, making changes of efficiency and education quality, heading towards developing Vietnamese Education system to be more globalising with the area and the world.
This requires pedagogical centers to be active when approaching international trends to adjust their their training curriculum appropriate with the school’s development, leading to pedagogical students’ awareness to adapt themselves to new regulations.
Subjects at high school, such as Foreign Language, Literature, History,… are considered boring, unattractive to both instructors and learners due to several reasons, including lack of reference materials extracting problems under research, judging with different arguments, lack of OCW for teachers to refer to, research literature seminar, historical and geographical events in a more specific way.
Sharing knowledge, teaching and studying materials is one of the main purpose of OCW, which is necessary for a learning community, knowledge-based society as nowadays.
Improving High school teachers’ quality
To enhance quality among social and natural sciences teachers, M.Sc Phuong Hung Minh Tran says that Teacher training center should build data system, quantify data to add more materials for pedagogical students. Sharing data, materials from universities to high school will create connection between training centers and schools, connection between training institutions and employers, for on spot teacher training, teaching and learning at high schools.
Besides, School of Pedagogy can train, re-train teachers to serve textbook change and high school curriculum via online service, sharing OCW, saving time and training expenses…
Teachers specializing in natural and social sciences need relentless training after graduation from pedagogical school. Self-training is essential for approaching new information source, updating new knowledge of the subject, supporting teaching at high schools.
Teachers themselves have to self-train via OCW in their department and library in the high school that they are working
Trung Kien – MOET
