Smart Forest Expertise and Online Teaching for Vietnam

If sea levels rise by 40–45 centimetres, 28% of the land in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam will be submerged. If the water rises by one metre, 43% of the land will be lost.

So says Associate Professor Hai Hòa Nguyen from the Vietnam National University of Forestry (VNUF).

“According to the IPCC, Vietnam is one of the countries most affected by climate change,” he says.

In Vietnam, it is understood that climate change cannot be stopped, but it can be mitigated, and its effects can be adapted to. The country is committed to rapid emission reductions and aims to neutralise them by 2050.

Against this background, Vietnamese and Finnish universities began the CLIDEV project in 2020 to develop education related to climate change. The project ended in August 2024 and involved VNUF, Hue University, Tay Nguyen University, Thai Nguyen University of Agriculture and Forestry and, from Finland, the University of Helsinki and Laurea University of Applied Sciences.

New climate change-aware curricula and at least five climate change courses that also consider gender equality were created for the forestry departments of four Vietnamese universities.

“We encourage the forestry sector to become even more carbon-negative, and climate change education helps with that. After the courses, young people will have a better understanding of the need for emission reductions and how to achieve them.”

Project coordinator Dipjoy Chakma, from the University of Helsinki, is particularly pleased with the curriculum reform.

“It was a good process, where drafts were sent for rounds of comments.”

“At the University of Helsinki, curricula are reviewed and updated, if necessary, every three years. In contrast, only a limited number of Vietnamese universities adopt a Western-style teaching model and regularly revise their academic programmes. It was observed that rural universities tend to follow a more rigid approach. However, during the project, it became clear that by 2024, using curricula from the 1970s was no longer practical.”

Innovative Teaching

The new courses address, for example, particular scenarios: What happens if we cut down more forests and change land use? What will the consequences be in 25 years’ time?

“We also went over how to calculate a carbon footprint,” Dipjoy Chakma says. He praises the significant contributions of Professor Emeritus Markku Kanninen to the project content.

The University of Helsinki was responsible for the content of the project, while Laurea University of Applied Sciences focused on developing online learning and pedagogy training. During the project, the Vietnamese partners were introduced to the MOOC online learning platform for the first time.

The Finnish team visited Vietnam several times, and Vietnamese university teachers were also brought to Finland.

“We trained over 100 people from the university staff,” Chakma says.

In addition to Finland, expertise in the use of drones for forestry research was gathered from the Forest Restoration Research Unit at Chiang Mai University in Thailand, a leading institution in forest restoration education in Southeast Asia.

Growing Pains in Online Education

The transitioning to online teaching did not go entirely smoothly. According to Dipjoy Chakma, internet connections are good, but in Vietnam, face-to-face interaction and book reading have traditionally been the norm in education.

“Vietnam is a very hierarchical country led from the top down,” Chakma says.

There is still a long way to go to achieve Western-style student-centred teaching.

Hai Hòa Nguyen says that in the early stages of the project, there was opposition to online teaching because lecturers did not understand how it could work.

“Some people are conservative, and learning something new always takes time. And teachers have limited time.”

However, the COVID-19 pandemic helped motivate people, so the courses offered by Laurea and internal university courses gained popularity. Now, according to Nguyen, teachers are satisfied with MOOC environments. The biggest beneficiaries are the students.

“Some may have a 300-kilometre commute to the university, so online studies save time and money,” Nguyen says. “Many master’s students work during the day, so it’s easier for them to find time to study in the evenings and on weekends.”

A degree cannot be completed entirely remotely because, for example, laboratories are still physical.

“I did see a virtual lab at Laurea in Finland, so maybe in the future we will have something like that too,” Nguyen says.

Finland Should Stay Involved

The partners applied for funding for a continuation project, but they did not receive HEP funding. HEP replaced the HEI-ICI programme this year. Funding has decreased due to cuts in Finland’s development cooperation budget.

“Fortunately, we received additional funding from the European Union,” Chakma says. The EU project involves three Vietnamese universities instead of four.

“We have a lot to offer in Finland in terms of online learning and AI skills.”

He believes that Finland should remain active in Vietnam’s forestry sector, perhaps through the embassy. Vietnam is a rapidly developing middle-income country which also provides business opportunities.

“To sustain the cooperation with Vietnamese higher education institutions, the co-funding principle could be adopted. There are also funding sources in Vietnam. It doesn’t have to be that Finnish taxpayers pay for everything.”

The collaboration provides learning and experiences for students and teachers, and research cooperation can lead to commercial cooperation, he believes.

Opportunities for Higher Technology

Hai Hòa Nguyen is also interested in developing the use of artificial intelligence in forest conservation in Vietnam.

“It’s in its infancy. We do have a lot of data that AI can use, for example, to identify tree species, insects and birds.”

He believes it would be beneficial to create continuation projects to explore how AI and other advanced technologies can be used in combating and adapting to climate change.

He is planning a course on the use of drones for forest monitoring.

Drone imagery is already very detailed and can provide a good view of land formations and forest details. The software can detect forest fires and early signs of deforestation or forest degradation, and it can also warn on a plot-by-plot basis if something is wrong.

“Drone projects would help us monitor forest conditions and manage forests more efficiently.”

According to Nguyen, in Vietnam, one forest ranger is responsible for an average of 1,000 hectares of forest, and the country is mountainous.

“There’s no way to cover that in one day.”

He dreams that, in the future, a forest ranger could sit in their office and send a drone to check on the condition of the forest.

Text: Esa Salminen