In December 2020, MienTrung Industry and Trade College was struggling through the Covid-19 time with a lot of changes. We are a public vocational and technical school in the central part of Viet Nam – based at Tuy Hoa city near the ocean, with not many industrial zones or big companies here. So we are a bit isolated from the business world outside, but we are quite a peaceful and rural place. Meanwhile our students require new knowledge, new skillset and attitude in technical and vocational fields for “new-normal” after the pandemic, but in some aspects, our teachers are “not up to date”. That is the reason why we looked for a way to help our teachers enhancing their skillsets, their knowledge and their connections. Unfortunately, the Covid-19 outbreak prevents international volunteers to come to Viet Nam – especially to the Phu Yen province, so we can only doing volunteering online. Therefore we googled and found Online Volunteering Service, for looking for a better quality education for the rural students here.

Online Volunteering service is a part of The United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme which contributes to sustainable human development through volunteerism worldwide. At first, the programme did help us a lot in connecting us with the volunteers, guide us what we need to do to make the collaboration. But it is not very easy for us to get the connection to the world. The students are using low quality phones, their IT and English knowledge are quite low so they can not attain classes with UNV volunteers. That is the reason why we only have 1 class for our students with one volunteer. We really hope that we can make more classes in the future so that our students can directly learn from international volunteers, so they can step out of their comfort zone, using their English and ideas and to realize the world, that they are not alone and the world is really flat.

The first project happened in 2 months with 13 volunteers. Then we had the second project happening in 6 months with 7 volunteers. The first project aims to enhancing our teachers in their fields whilist the second project aims to improving our teachers and students in English. The end beneficiaries are the students that learn from our teachers. The first beneficiaries are our teachers, then the board of teachers and the school. The volunteers are our English teachers or peers in our fields therefore they make huge difference for our community. Because their lessons with high quality curriculum or lesson resources inspired our teachers in learning new knowledge in their fields and keep learning English. The teachers got inspiration and knowledge from the lessons of the volunteers, then they apply those knowledge into their lessons with our rural students in Viet Nam. The teachers also have the motivation and foundation to updating their lessons through new resources in English. Moreover, the students that learnt directly from UNV volunteers are eventually stepping out of their comfort zone and using English frequently.

At the end of the second project, MITC held an online evaluation session for everyone to come to meet each other and share their ideas or feeling at the end of May 2021. However, we are going to create the first discussion session between volunteers in the same project before the project begins and one more discussion session when the project will finish. We had a wonderful time with our volunteers. We feel inspiration and get happy moments. We believe that this world is small enough to make friends and big enough for everyone.

We believe that the project model can be scaled up or replicated by seminars, sharing experiences in workshop and online groups with local schools and worldwide. We all know that learning is a lifelong process, MITC is going to keep this project alive by making the project to all schools in Tuy Hoa city and contributing an offline worldwide meeting in Tuy Hoa city after Covid19.

So we just want to tell the world about Online Volunteering: