Starting from 16/2 our project on Challenge Future is open for voting to everyone from 18 to 30 years of age. So please vote for us and help us get votes from your friends. Only you can reach them.
Even though we are trying our best to get the prize as funding, in the long run we’ll commit to our promise to bring the world at large and Vietnam in particular free education regardless of the outcome of the competition. If you can share your knowledge proficiently, be our teachers. If you don’t imagine yourself teaching, help us reach out to teachers you know who would like to contribute, cause we’re building our network of teachers. We accept any kind of educational videos from cooking lessons to mobile-phone repair lessons. But we will also actively look into where the society needs us the most and design core programs to fulfill that need. We’ll actively look for sponsors and donors ourselves, but if you know any, help us reach to them as well.
If you have any question, please leave a comment here or email Long Le at lelong88@gmail.com
I have several questions for you.
1. As far as I am concerned, in term of academic knowledge, there have been Open Courses Wares from several universities in the US (MIT, Stanford, Yale…) currently operated under university funding which is a comparatively larger funding than this competition. In term of non-academic knowledge, there’re already a significant number of How-to websites which are getting money from online advertisements on their website. Which advantages do you have to compete with those websites? Where will you get the money for maintaining your website?
2) You’re focusing on Vietnamese community, it is reasonabe to provide videos in Vietnamese language. However, your ultimate goal is global market, which is multicultural and multilanguage, how can you manage the difference among those audiences. Why isn’t it a better solution to encourage Vietnamese people to learn English and you provide program in English language?
3) Statistics from the other Open Courses Wares have shown that the longer the series of lessons are, the less learners keep following until the end. How could you attract people to follow your program.
4) Providing that your main audiences are at the learning ages (<30 years old), how can you keep your audiences from wasting their time on Facebook, Youtube music, and focus on your site?
Thanks for your very thoughtful comments. Nothing really matters more.
1) There are already many free educational materials in English, yet extremely few people in Vietnam can take advantage of them (less then 1% I suppose. And that 1% probably don’t need much help). So when we try to reach out to the rest, which is millions of people, we can reasonably ignore those resources. In terms of non-academic knowledge, there are a lot of how-to websites but they provide quick-fix in English, not a skill that can help a street youth in Vietnam who knows non-English and have no skills to start to produce and live by themselves. I once tried to fix my laptop monitor. I succeeded with such how-to’s but afterwards I was being sold a course in mobile-phone repair at only $20. I wondered what if I can create 100 such courses in Vietnamese and encourage 100,000 unemployed unskilled Vietnamese people to learn them.
2) Providing lessons in Vietnamese is not just a focus. It’s the only way we can bring up the underprivileged people in the society. You may not notice them because you are from a completely different world, highly academic and proficient in English. Yet, again they are millions and millions of people in Vietnam alone. We’re not trying to help you in anyway, but we look for people like you to help us by sharing your knowledge for free.
3) We’re not competing with educational websites. We’re leveraging them. We’ll proactively ask for permission to translate their lessons when necessary. Funding from MIT, Yale for Open Courses are certainly huge, that’s why we have a huge advantage, not disadvantage.
4) Our ultimate goal is not global market. Our ultimate goal is several small markets. We aim to copy the model with different languages once we succeed in Vietnam to benefit other groups of people worldwide. We’re trying to tap the very bottom of the world in terms of education and opportunities. Most of the time those groups are not intertwined at all.
5) Yes, the ultimate solution is to encourage Vietnamese people to learn English. That’s why we’ll focus on providing quality English lessons. However, the day when the most underprivileged Vietnamese know enough English to tap into the wealth of knowledge in English themselves is years and years away. And probably forever if no one does something about it. After so many years of extremely heavy investing in English learning, do you wonder why still only 1% of Vietnamese people know English? The Vietnamese population is 85 millions. The dilemma is clear, who need the most opportunities to rise out of poverty are those who least likely to have them. I see a vast amount of opportunities for myself, but I doubt if a kid living in a remote village living for less than $1 a day would see the same.
6) We don’t restrict any form of lesson donations because we want to make it a community movement where people simply share just as they share on forums or wikipedia. We would have stopped there and need no funding at all. The only reason why we need funding is to bring a focus to the movement. We’ll focus on developing English programs, like I said, and programs such as general health information. About 75% Vietnamese people live in the suburban, isn’t it so common to hear stories about how badly informed they are in terms of protecting their own health and their family? They even try to cure themselves in very damaging ways. Isn’t it true that a large proportion of them only go to the hospital once they are dying?
7) Our main audience are not those who are familiar with social media such as Facebook or Youtube. We try to give them resources, but in the end, we leave the decision to them whether to use these resources. Our main audience are those who we consider need our help. We’ll need some research to provide specific details of who they are and how we can reach them.
8. Open Courses, I think, are ineffective in a way that they didn’t pick up. The only open courses I could really learn from are http://khanacademy.org Please have a look. He’s inspirational and his method is somehow extremely learnable even though he has a thousand videos made my himself already. I’m thinking what if with some luck and a bare minimum 500 million VND, we can even surpass hundreds of times better funded projects in terms of learn-ability?
9) With just 500 million VND, I wonder what project would bring more benefits to more people, with even a bigger prospect behind it? We believe effectiveness can make a huge difference.
10) We could have hosted video lessons on our own website for professional look. But for long term benefits, we leverage free hosting websites such as Youtube and Dailymotion and self-maintaining classes. Our affiliates are provided with tools to post lessons, keep track of students and response to questions all by themselves. Amazingly, we aim to maintain our website at $5/month, which I’m providing for free. Our cost so far is $10/year for this domain and $5/month for web hosting. That’s about $6/month in total.
Hope that answers your question.
1) “In terms of non-academic knowledge, there are a lot of how-to websites but they provide quick-fix in English, not a skill that can help a street youth in Vietnam who knows non-English and have no skills to start to produce and live by themselves.”
- Please categorize and specify which skills “that help a street youth in Vietnam to start to produce and live by themselves”. Give me several examples that you could not find those skills on how-to websites.
“I wondered what if I can create 100 such courses in Vietnamese and encourage 100,000 unemployed unskilled Vietnamese people to learn them.”
- To my understanding, they should connect to the internet regularly to access to your learning resources. Generally, in developing countries, people who have regular access to the internet are often middle-class, which, according to your point, do not need much help. You focus on people who live for less than $1 a day .So other than internet, in which way could those unemployed and unskilled people could possibly access to your learning resource? Or how could you provide them cheap (or free) internet access (<1$/day)?
3) We’ll proactively ask for permission to translate their lessons when necessary. Funding from MIT, Yale for Open Courses are certainly huge, that’s why we have a huge advantage, not disadvantage.
- To my understanding, the advantage is that you are provided infinite materials for free from those big institutes. As far as I am concerned, translating those material requires a huge amount of work, not to mention the qualification of the translators . Hence, translators can be volunteers initially, however, in the long term, they shoud get paid. You can set up priority to choose which particular materials to translate to reduce the work, however, it will take a lot of time to filter those learning resources, and time is money. So my question then be "How can you generate the money for translation?". If funding from those institutes is your advantage, how can you raise constantly funding to your project?
1) There are several skills I can think of: fixing mobile-phone, Photoshop, car maintenance, etc. Again, those who need those skills don’t know English. And in Vietnamese language, I find the stock of resources almost empty.
2) To access those who don’t have Internet, we need funding. We budget to set up a number of ConnEd libraries with video viewing equipments and a stock of appropriate programs in DVDs.
3) We only translate where necessary. We promote learning English so Vietnamese people can immerse themselves into those materials.
From your points 1,2, I imagine a “trường dạy nghề online”. So let me take a comparison here:
Trường dạy nghề: lower class people give away money in term of “tuition”, they will be taught skills and they are promised to get jobs after graduating with those skills.The institutes provide learning resources and pedagoges and use the tuition to maintain themselves. It’s a basic demand-supply equilibrium.
Vietnam Online Academy: lower class people get the skills FOR FREE from the internet. The institute here has to provide not only learning resources and volunteering teachers but also access equipments to the learners. So where is the continuous money to maintain the institute comes from? Providing that you win the prize, yet 20 000 euros prize is an impulse, which cannot make it a sustainable model in the long run? How can you generate money to stand by yourself after 20 000 euros go to its end?
3) We only translate where necessary. We promote learning English so Vietnamese people can immerse themselves into those materials.
This point is contradict with your previous point 5.
5) Yes, the ultimate solution is to encourage Vietnamese people to learn English. That’s why we’ll focus on providing quality English lessons. However, the day when the most underprivileged Vietnamese know enough English to tap into the wealth of knowledge in English themselves is years and years away.
Thanks for your comments.
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