Investigation of the Geosocial Obstacles in the Curriculum Development of Civil Engineering Programs in Vietnam

After three years of the CDIO deployment in the Faculty of Civil Engineering at Duy Tan University (DTU), a number of improvements have been accomplished, namely students’ creativity, flexibility and adaptability under various learning or working conditions. Most students are now more proactive and progressive in their learning approach despite of the fact that Civil Engineering is always a dull and demanding discipline. A recent survey, however, showed that while improvements are prevalent, the rates of improvement were not as fast as expected, especially when compared to those of students in Western countries. Further analysis has demonstrated a number of geo-social difference reasons for this reality: First of all, cultural barriers continue to be a major obstacle to open discussion and presentation of new ideas amongst the students. Due to the Asian cultural values, many students are still passive in their in-class participation unless given the opportunity, or even requirement, to do the otherwise. Secondly, even though there is additional coursework for soft-skill development, the new soft skills developed by our students did not appear to be as beneficial as expected. The main reason has to do with the fact that most of our soft-skill courses are very general by nature like Public Speaking skills, Office Writing skills, Critical Thinking skills, etc. They were not designed specifically for students in the field of Civil Engineering. This dilemma is also the same for the soft-skill development of students in other technology and engineering disciplines at DTU. Thirdly, by focusing on the traditional Career Planning approach, entrepreneurship skills are usually ignored or not emphasized enough. This actually is a major weakness of Vietnamese (and Asian) students compared with Western students; and more than often, this hinders Asian students from thinking big. Last but not least, while new technologies in Civil Engineering are quickly introduced to current students, not all of them are already adopted by businesses in the industry in Vietnam. This creates a major gap for students in their approach when they come for work or internships at many real-world businesses. Understanding these geo-social realities is only one of the many efforts in our continuous improvement of the CDIO model for Civil Engineering at DTU, and yet, our findings will offer great insights for universities and colleges in Asia, which are looking for ways to overcome traditional cultural barriers. A series of solutions are also proposed through this paper, accordingly.

Proceedings of the 12th International CDIO Conference, Turku, Finland, June 12-16 2016