Application

Nga Nguyen, Phuong

• Director
  
• Vietnam National University
  
• Centre for Education Quality Assurance & Research
• Development
  
• Vietnam

She is the recipient of the Australian-Vietnamese government awards 1991-1992, the Australian Agency for International Development 1994-1997. She was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2002-03. She has received numerous research grants, including grants from Vietnam National University Science Budget, Ministry of Science and Technology (Vietnam) on assessments and evaluation of teaching-learning and training models at higher education. She has consulted on projects with organizations such as the World Bank, the Australian Agency for International Development, the Australian International Volunteers, the Ministry of Education and Training (Vietnam) focusing on assessment and evaluation from primary to higher education, teachers' standards and quality assurance and accreditation for higher education

Dr. Nguyen is a member of the International Quality Assurance Agencies for Higher Education, a Chief Quality Assurance Officer of the ASEAN University Network, and a member of the Association for Institutional Research.

Selected Publications

• Nga, N.P. (editor). "Higher Education: Quality and Evaluation" (2005). Vietnam National University Hanoi Publisher, Hanoi Vietnam.
  
• Nga, NP. "Teacher Evaluation and its Development" in Nga, N.P. edition. Higher Education: Quality and Evaluation, p.17-47, 2005, Vietnam National University Hanoi Publisher, Hanoi Vietnam.
  
• Nga, N.P & Trung B.K. "Student Evaluation of Teaching Effectiveness" in Nga, N.P. edition. Higher Education: Quality and Evaluation, p.120-139, 2005, Vietnam National University Hanoi Publisher, Hanoi Vietnam.
  
• Chinh, N.D., Nga, N.P and others "Accreditation in Higher Education" (2002). Vietnam National University Hanoi Publisher, Hanoi Vietnam

With the arrival of the 21st century, mankind started to picture clearly significant challenges of the development of knowledge-based economies and of civil society, and realizes the essential powerful role of higher education in producing academic and professional human resources to confront the challenges. Hence, mass-access to higher education with diversifying models and recruitment methods and criteria becomes an issue in the developing countries where higher education fails to accommodate the needs of the societies, in which Vietnam is a case.

Vietnamese applicants to higher education institutions have to sit for very competitive high stakes entrance examinations as colleges and universities can only afford approximately 15.8% of them. The proposed research is aimed to examine models of higher education training and/or institutions applied worldwide that could accommodate the needs of Vietnam society in mass and equity access to tertiary education. Specifically the research is aimed to find out the answers to the following issues:

What models of higher education training and/or institutions could feasibly accommodate the needs of Vietnam society in mass and equity access to tertiary education?
What should be done then to evaluate if the proposed models ensure high academic training quality?

The objectives are not purely studying current models of higher education training programs in the world, but examining the feasibility of adapting and/or adopting some models to the Vietnamese contexts, then implementing the most suitable ones with some modification to the reality in Vietnam. This research is an extension of what the researcher together with her team has been doing currently within a narrow scope.

Further, it is of essentially importance to deeply study what scholars in the industrialized nations and in other developing countries are doing to confront the issue "Elite and Mass-Access to Higher Education and Equity" in their national settings with a hope that collaborative work worldwide would bring about more understanding of the challenging realities posed by the 21st century to higher education in diversified settings and in the global setting as a whole so that ways to effectively address them in various national settings and international settings would be identified globally.

Data will be collected via in-depth interviews and surveys among educators, students, researchers, and scholars to explore their opinions on the current models of training they experienced. Furthermore, the international exchange visit to USA is a valuable opportunity for the researcher to meeting with scholars and administrators at higher education institutions from public to private, non-profit institutions, and learning from their institution's structure, flexible training models and quality assurance procedures. Thus more information and experienced would be exchanged and gained to enable the accomplishment of the proposed objectives of the research. Furthermore, it is hoped that collaborative activities with the visited institutions would also be explored.