Dear Associate Professor Dr Nantana… acting AUN-QA chairperson,
Dear colleagues, students and media reporters.
First of all, I would like to express our sincere appreciation for Dr Nantana presence today at the AUN-QA certificate awarding ceremony. I know you are extremely busy but your presence is a great honour for us all.
I would like to congratulate the 4 faculties with 4 programmes that are going to be awarded the AUN-QA certificates for your programmes. Please join me to give them a big applause for their achievement. Can each programme team stand up please:
Programme team of Bachelor of Environmental Engineering Technology.
Thank you
Programme team of Bachelor of Heat transfer Engineering Technology.
Thank you
Programme team of Bachelor of Machine Manufacturing Engineering Technology. Thank you
And Programme team of Bachelor of Electronics and Tele- communication Engineering Technology
Thank you.
Also, I would like to thank all staff, students, alumni and industrial partners, especially staff of Quality Assurance Office for your great support. Each of you support the university in different ways but your effort has made our quality.
Dear All,
The awarding ceremony this morning isn’t just a certificate awarding ceremony for the 4 programme assessed last December. This tells us that if every one of us works hard, works professionally, work together and work all for our beloved students, we can achieve far.
Over the last few months, I have been asked by so many colleagues from other universities how much would it cost in term money and human resources for having 8 programmes assessed by AUN-QA in just 2 years and how to achieve good score for those assessments. My answer to this question is just simple: Quality is a long journey!
Many people think that to have a programme assessed by AUN-QA, all the university needs to do is to provide as much money as possible and gather a dedicated team to work on the self-assessment report for a year or so, trying to retrieve the evidences and documents but it shouldn’t be as simple as that. We must have a good internal quality assurance system to produce good and sustainable result.
As many of you have already known, in 2005 we developed the ISO 9000:2001 management system. Many staff at the time, and even now many people are still doubt on the efficiency of the ISO system, quoting it was not suitable for education management…but as you can see, the system helped us to do things in a systematical approach, and in a continuous quality enhancement sense. Since then, we strived to improve our quality management system, make it suitable to our need of quality management for higher education. In early 2013, I was lucky to meet with Dr Natana in a conference and then we were determined to follow AUN-QA standards. We have revised our internal quality assurance in compliance with AUN-QA IQA model. Revised, yes I said revised because our previous quality management was quite closely matched with AUN-QA model. We should be proud of our persistent pursuit of our quality management system. HCMUTE operates its quality management as designed in practice, keep improving the quality management itself, we don’t just design a system and leave it on paper like many cases that I know. Our medium term strategic plan was developed carefully with the involvement of every staff, then it is translated into annual University KPIs and then assigned to responsible units. We have a KPIs rigorous monitoring mechanism to ensure everything we plan must be done. Now, everyone takes this process for granted, but I think we have reached some sort of quality culture for this matter. Another example, If you can still remember, in those early days in 2005, when we asked that the academic faculty teaching performance to be evaluated by students, many of us objected the ideas, questioning if students were matured enough to judge teachers because teachers were some sort of untouchable people for students. But now, student evaluation is so common and that we look to the result and try to improve ourselves. That is quality culture. Talking all of this, I mean quality and quality culture wont just come over a year of the SAR and the site visit preparation, but it is a long journey, so thank you again my staff, students and alumni for your dedication.
Dear my colleagues, I would like to take this opportunity to assert that Innovation which is one of the three pillars of HCMUTE educational philosophy, has made us go this far and it will help us go further. Please don’t think Innovation is something must be big and expensive. We can always think big and start small, then make it bigger and sustain the result. When we first converted the basement of this building into a convenience area for students with hammocks for students to sleep when they need it, we even had people laugh at the idea, but you have seen how students value this and many other universities have come to learn the experience. I am sure they will come up with something grander than ours soon. Our UTE TV channel was the first one in Vietnam and you have seen how effective it is in communication with stakeholders. And these are cheap, not expensive!!! And yet, other universities will follow suit soon so we must keep innovating to be not fallen behind! All we need is to think of our students not only as our customers that we have to satisfy their needs but as our beloved sons, daughters, sisters or brothers and act for their bright future. That is part of the Humanity that we put in our educational philosophy.
We have heard a lot and feel the heat of Revolution 4.0, especially for higher education. You may know that In May 2013, Mckinsy report pointed out the 12 disruptive technologies that would transform lives, business and global economy and the advances we have seen the last 5 years again confirmed the rapid advances of those technologies. Some of these 12 disruptive technologies such as cloud computing, robotics, Internet of things, mobile internet…are already changing the ways we do things every day as well as our work as educator. We have strived to develop and sustain our LMS, we can be proud to be the first university to establish Bachelor programme in Data Engineering in VN and use big data for students enrollments but we must keep innovating and enhancing the quality in every area of our service and I always say: Innovate, Innovate, Innovate. Innovation or Die! Soon we will launch UTE online University or we will call it UTEX and I hope every staff will strongly support it.
Dear Dr Nantana, Integration is one pillar of our Educational Philosophy as you have known, and joining the AUN-QA family is one way to help us integrate into the region and the world. We have learned a lot when we implement the AUN-QA internal quality assurance system. We are happy and honour to host the next assessment of our 3 programmes back to back to AUN-QA tier 2 training in December. Thank you again for giving us this honour and your constant support.
Once again, thank you very much all staff and students and don’t please don’t stop doing PDCA.
Thank you!