Responses to Learning Management System: A Case Study in Higher Education in Vietnam

Authors: Tan Tin Dang and Margaret Robertson

Although Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has been widely used in educational institutions for more than two decades, it is still in its early birth in Vietnam. Marked by the official letter No. 9772/BGDĐT-CNTT by Vietnamese government dated in October 2008, ICT applications started to be encouraged and invested in this centralized educational system. That means hardware infrastructure, software applications, and broadband internet connection began to be established and employed in teaching and learning activities across the national schools. Therefore, the ICT usages of both teachers and students would be worth investigating especially when there is a stereotype that Asian students in general and Vietnamese students in particular are often passive in class and slow in responding to changes.

This paper is to address the responses of Vietnamese undergraduate students and three teachers of English to the integration of a Moodle site during a language skill course. It particularly examines the teachers’ perceptions of this interactive web-based technology and their actual usages during the course as well as the students’ participation in this online environment. Qualitative data from the teachers’ reflections indicated three factor groups that significantly contributed to their attitudes toward and employment of ICT, namely personal, institutional, and social. In addition, students presented the three patterns of online participation, namely task-oriented, content-oriented, and community-oriented. These reflected a transition in both teachers’ practices and students’ learning expectations and behaviors. The paper finally concludes with a number of pedagogical suggestions for the process of integrating technology in education in the local context to engage students in the online learning processes with more personalized learning environments.

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