ALT ELESIG participation in the Digi:Đổi Consortiumexperience
By Denise Sweeney, University of Nottingham
What is great about working on international collaborative projects is firstly you get to meet new people from across the world, and secondly how you get to learn a lot from these new professional acquaintances and experiences which in turn enhances/influences your own professional practice way beyond the life of the project.
On the success of the ALT ELESIG Scholar Scheme, we were invited to become part of the Digi:Đổi Consortium a British Council funded project. Our participation in this project has been for nearly two years and in that time, I’ve been involved in supporting the group mentoring aspect of the project. What has been good about this was having the opportunity to meet Vietnamese higher education colleagues grappling with digital transformation both in person and online. This involved being part of synchronous MS Teams meetings where colleagues presented their digital transformation projects to seek advice and mentoring. We were very lucky to have simultaneous translation through these sessions which meant I was able to give both verbal and written feedback which was a great way for projects to further pursue their aims through this ‘just in time’ feedback.
This also involved in person/hybrid workshops where again feedback was provided through simultaneous translation and digital facilitators. These experiences culminated in my visit to Ho Chi Minh city for just over a week in late 2024 to participate in the two-day showcase event. What was lovely to see was the variety of projects that were presented and the experiences that people shared about their learnings. It was great to meet people that I had met online in person. I cannot fault the hospitality of the project team and their support and enthusiasm of helping the whole UK Digi:Đổi Consortium contingent to feel welcome. We were able to produce quality work during our visit as a result.
It was great to meet new colleagues whilst I was there and hopefully some of those relationships will continue and develop over time. Being part of this project has been such a great opportunity to see how we can improve the ALT-ELESIG Scholar Scheme going into 2025.
As being part of this project, I have had to reflect on how effective mentoring and group mentoring strategies might be and how this can be better supported for those who might struggle. It was something that some of the project colleagues in Vietnam grappled with and I think there is a cultural conceptual challenge around notions of expert and novice and the power dynamics. Can novices actually learn from each other through group mentoring? In the digital transformation context where we are all professionals with expertise but maybe novices in the digital landscape. How can we mutually support and mentor ourselves?
I was really impressed to see at the showcase a large number of women presenting on digital transformation and that was across a range of women from senior to junior academics and HE administrative and support staff. Also, the number of collaborative projects where people were helping each other solve their digital transformation challenges collaboratively. I was really impressed with the quality of the projects as well as diverse use of digital transformation resources that we had shared with them and how then they made those resources useful to their context. What is interesting around Vietnam from a higher education perspective is the fact that there a range of different HE providers. There are a number of private universities and foreign universities there as well and international partnerships with not only the UK but also Australia and the US. So, there is a real variance in the size and type of institutions. Then geography brings up lots of issues especially when you’re thinking of digital transformation there is a lot of unique features of particular geographical areas, and it goes beyond just reliable Wi-Fi access to unequal access to resources and funding due the variance in institutions. Thus, in this project, there was not a one-size-fits-all digital transformation approach.
Whilst I was in Ho Chi Minh city, I noticed that there was a real thirst for non-credit bearing digital transformation professional development experiences. I think there’s a gap in the market for ‘just in time’ professional development that might lead to a digital badge for example or some kind of recognition of participation. This was something that more than one colleague brought up
As someone who grew up in the antipodes where I worked quite closely with Vietnamese refugees in a previous career it was good to see Vietnam is open to all different types of pedagogical input beyond the Anglosphere. The fact that colleagues were working with Finnish or Hungarian academics or were working with other international aid organisations it was really encouraging to see and areas for new learning for us.
Being part of the Digi:Đổi Consortium project was a really wonderful experience for ELESIG members and I wish everyone that was part of the project good wishes in future projects and collaborations.
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