The collaborative project between Talent Gate and VinUniversity is a prime example of a digital eLearning solution for higher education, aiming to comprehensively equip students with practical skills and career guidance before they enter the real-world work environment.
About the Client
VinUniversity is one of the leading non-profit private universities in Vietnam, built on the model of an elite university, aiming for international educational standards. The university offers multi-disciplinary programs, focusing on cutting-edge fields such as business, data science, engineering, and health sciences, with a highly qualified faculty of both domestic and international qualifications.
With thousands of students enrolled each year, VinUniversity places special emphasis on preparing students for their careers from their early years of university. Before implementing the project, the university organized many traditional internship orientation activities such as workshops and in-person skills classes. However, these forms of training are limited in their ability to personalize the learning experience, are difficult to scale up, and do not fully utilize the advantages of digital technology.
In this context, VinUniversity sought a flexible, modern training solution capable of synchronizing content, standardizing skills, and creating an engaging learning experience for all students before their first summer internship.
The Challenge/Problem
The biggest challenge that VinUniversity and Talent Gate faced together was: how to convey all the necessary knowledge, skills, and mindset for the internship in a single eLearning course, while still ensuring its attractiveness to Gen Z students.
Specifically, the project had to address several challenges simultaneously:
- Diverse and complex training content: from identifying personal strengths and weaknesses, career orientation, to application skills, interview skills, communication, and relationship building in a business environment.
- Traditional learning methods are no longer attractive enough to the new generation of students – those accustomed to visual, highly interactive content and personalized experiences.
All of these factors indicate that it is time for VinUniversity to have a systematic eLearning digital solution, not only to address immediate needs but also to create a long-term foundation for future skills training programs.
Strategy and Solution
Talent Gate approached the project with a “learner-centered” mindset, harmoniously combining pedagogical standards for lectures while incorporating new technological elements. The target audience – Gen Z students – who are about to embark on their first internships, were placed at the center of the entire process of designing content, scenarios, and learning experiences.
Instead of delivering knowledge in a traditional way, Talent Gate chose storytelling as a central theme, helping learners easily empathize, role-play, and remember the content.
Implementation Solution
The course is built around the personal development journey of two VinUniversity students currently interning at a company. The entire setting, characters, situations, and case studies are inspired by real-world examples from VinUniversity’s own learning and working environment, aiming to create a sense of familiarity and direct connection with the learners.
The course content is divided into three main modules, each approximately 60 minutes long, focusing on a key skill set during the internship. Simultaneously, various teaching techniques are cleverly integrated and combined within each module, such as animated videos, instructor-led videos, interactive elements, quizzes, etc.
Not stopping at the basic requirements, Talent Gate always asks: “What can we do better?”. The answer is a catchy, youthful music video introduction to the course. This course delivered an unexpected emotional impact, breaking the stereotype of rigid skills courses, instantly capturing attention and sparking students’ interest in learning from the very first moments.
The course demonstrated the unique values that Talent Gate offers: the seamless integration of content design, technology, and learner psychology; creative thinking; and a willingness to experiment with new solutions to enhance the learning experience.
Results
In the long term, the project not only addresses immediate training needs but also creates a model for digitizing eLearning lectures for businesses and educational institutions, making it easier for VinUniversity to expand, update, and reuse training content in subsequent years.
Furthermore, the project was honored to achieve a TOP 10 ranking in the Best co-production project (edtech company and school working together) category of the 2023 Global Education Technology Awards (https://edtechawardsglobal.com/). (back link to awards page)
Conclusion
Through this collaborative project with VinUniversity, Talent Gate once again affirms its capacity to provide high-quality, effective, and innovative eLearning lecture digitization solutions. Talent Gate believes that, with the right approach and appropriate technology, eLearning is not only a tool for knowledge transfer but also a key to transforming the learning culture – from “being forced to learn” to “wanting to learn, enjoying learning, and actively sharing” – in line with Talent Gate’s spirit of “Unlearn to learn.”
