Welcoming the delegation with the VASS President, there was Mr. Nguyen Thanh Ha, Head of International Cooperation Department (ICD); Ms. Nguyen Thi Van Anh, experts of ICD. On the AUF side, there was Mr. Abdelkader Zighed, AUF Director of Digitalization (leader); Ms. Ouidad Tebbaa, Asia-Pacific Regional Director; and some officials in charge of Project cooperating with VASS.
Speech at the opening, VASS President warmly welcomed the AUF's delegation. He stated that apart from carrying out scientific research tasks for policy advice to Party and State agencies, VASS is focusing on training high-quality human resources on Social Sciences & Humanities for the whole country. At the same time, he affirmed the long-lasting relationship between VASS and AUF in a series of high-quality human resources training projects in Vietnam; and expressed the desire that the two sides would work together to promote more cooperation projects in the future.
Ms. Ouidad Tebbaa stated: Francophone University Agency founded in 1961 in Montréal (Canada), the Francophone University Agency (AUF) is a multilateral institution which supports cooperation and solidarity among universities that use French as their teaching language, paying special attention to Francophone countries in Africa, Arab countries, Asia - Pacific, Central Europe, Eastern Europe and the Caribbean.
AUF has over 990 members including public and private universities, higher education institutions, campus networks and executive networks relating to university life in 118 countries. Every year, AUF offers thousands of scholarships to promote academic exchanges between member universities. The Agency's annual operating budget of more than 40 million euros comes from contributions from the Francophone countries. The goal of AUF is to increase relationships and cooperation among members in the following areas:
- Promote cooperation relationship in terms of scientific research
- Create development factors for the future
- Support for scientific research
- Sharing expertise…
In response to Ms. Ouidad Tebbaa, Mr. Abdelkader Zighed said: Currently, the number of students that are being trained by AUF is about 15 million students, it is expected that this number will increase to 30 million by 2030? The question is: "whether there is a country with enough infrastructure to accommodate this number of students?". Besides, finding the answer to the problem: "Is AUF able to design training content that is adequate for these students to find jobs upon graduation?" is an enormous challenge. Therefore, AUF decided to build large-scale and widespread projects in all member training units and believed that IT was leverage for AUF to be able to accomplish all the training objectives in an effective and quality manner as expected.
Currently, AUF has four support programs to digitally transform learning environments for greater student success. If VASS has a defined need for this, AUF as a global training network will mobilize this resource to support VASS to meet its goals. Mr. Abdelkader Zighed emphasized: This is the basis for AUF to conduct in cooperation with VASS to implement future cooperation projects to create an environment for training quality human resources on social sciences and human resources in the current digital technology context…
Through the discussions, the VASS President highly appreciated the orientations of cooperation between VASS and AUF, especially in the field of training and connecting to the digital library system. He believed that these projects help improve the practicality of training programs as well as the research and its impact on society.
In the coming time, the two sides will jointly implement many pilot projects to realize the objectives, especially in the digital library, digital database of scientists, and providing university administration environment for greater student success to VASS's postgraduate training objectives./.
Pham Vinh Ha
