Bass Visits Vietnam

Matt Bass, Assistant Teaching Professor in the Institute for Software Research (ISR), Software Engineering Masters Programs (MSE), traveled to Vietnam in July as part of an ongoing effort to transfer MSE curriculum to faculty members of Duy Tân University (DTU) in Da Nang. Educational partners with the MSE for over a decade, DTU is a rapidly growing private university of roughly 20,000 students. The development of private universities in the country is relatively new as most institutions of higher learning are run by the government.

The MSE’s academic partnership with DTU began in 2008 with an intensive, six-week, “train the trainer” program administered by the ISR’s Executive and Professional Education office and held on the Pittsburgh campus. During the program, faculty members from Duy Tân and Vân Lang universities attended sessions where they learned how to deliver course content directly from the ISR faculty members who developed the curriculum. Since then, every year a member of the MSE faculty has traveled to DTU in order to update content for core and elective courses, and provide instruction on how to use the materials in a classroom. Last year Bass delivered the latest version of the Architectures for Software Systems course. During his visit this year, he delivering content for his Engineering Data Intensive Scalable Systems course to over a dozen DTU faculty members.

Bass plans to return to DTU again next summer, but with a twist. Instead of delivering material for a specific course, he intends to tailor material — drawing upon content from a number of MSE courses — that will address the specific needs of the program at DTU. The focus will be the modern software engineering life cycle, in which continuous deployment changes the way requirements are collected, teams are structured, and architecture becomes even more important to the success of a project.

While in Vietnam, Bass also traveled to Ho Chi Mihn to participate in a recruitment panel at the VTC Technology and Digital Content Academy — an educational branch of the VTC corporation established six years ago to provide technology education to over 5,000 students — where he talked about the MSE program and explored possible future partnerships.