During her elective course New Technology in IT Application Development, Dr. Vo Thi Thanh Van, from the Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City, guided her 78 students through an in-depth exploration of cloud computing concepts, technologies, and methods. Dr. Vo challenged her students to team-up and use the AWS cloud environment to develop their own cloud services project for online ticketing, shopping, auctioneering or whatever innovations they could imagine and engineer.
Dr. Vo's shared that, although there are numerous cloud computing environments for her curriculum to cover, she selected AWS because it has global reach and a wide array of advanced tools. Many of the cloud-based services that are driving the digital economy in Vietnam, such as Grab and Airbnb, are made possible by skilled cloud computing engineers innovating in the AWS environment. Aiming to prepare work-ready engineers, Dr. Vo's course rigorously demanded that the students master object-oriented analysis, cloud architecting, and technical coding to create their team projects.
Two student-created E-commerce projects prototyped during the course were JobHunt & SaveFlight, a job seeking platform and an airline ticketing website respectively. Looking back on the students’ projects, Dr. Vo noted that the technical knowhow underlying the projects shows the diligence and teamwork used to weave together AWS' various computing tools to create a new cloud service. In Fall 2020, Dr. Vo intends to continue using the AWS Educate classroom learning management system to guide online project-based initiatives at Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City.
Dr. Vo developed her AWS lesson plans through the support of the USAID BUILD-IT & AWS Educate Lesson Plan Program. Beginning in August 2018, AWS hosted a series of face-to-face and online coaching sessions to guide faculty to bring AWS' industry leading tools into the classroom. Over the following months, Dr. Vo scanned through the myriad of AWS resources and structured an engaging path for her students. Since AWS is still a new cloud environment for many faculty, we applaud her for her hard work and commitment to curriculum innovation.
AWS Vietnam noted Dr. Vo’s achievement and has made her a key contact point for the roll out of their newest faculty capacity building program AWS Academy. In December, Dr. Vo and her department leads met with the officers from AWS Vietnam to co-develop a AWS Academy training for IUH faculty in Spring 2020. Dr. Vo demonstrates that curriculum integration can encourage further university and industry linkages.