Nguyen School

The Nguyen School in Hiroshima

The Power of Taking Actions to Serve

Starting in 1998, the goal of Nguyen School was to offer the instructions of the Vietnamese Language to people who were otherwise unable to obtain it by conventional ways.
In 1998, ten motivated students from all over Japan got together at Hiroshima YWCA to study the Internet Vietnamese Language Program. They ranged from twenty-five years old to almost sixties years old, living as far as Hokkaido in the north or Okinawa in the southern tip  of Japan.
The program was an experiment in curriculum design, and the effect of the Internet on the future of language education. Each student was required to pay a small sum of money to keep the school smoothly functioning, for the program itself received no external financial support. After a year, the word-of-mouth on the Internet spread and as a result the school got more applicants than they could accommodate.
As the founder of this school, though this article, I will tell you briefly who we are, what we did, how we did it, what worked, what didn't work, and what we're doing now. 

 The Nguyen School originated at Hiroshima YWCA where one lesson of Vietnamese language was held every Saturday afternoon. Since the YWCA was the only place people could learn Vietnamese in Hiroshima, the number of students was increased rapidly. At the same time, we also received requests from people who wanted to learn the language but weren' t able to because of a geographical barrier. To respond to these earnest inquiries, we began offering the same course with the same content on the Internet.
There were several issues to consider in the beginning such as; Can we use the same teaching materials that have been used in the physical classroom for the Internet course? What pedagogy method should we adopt as we were certain that teaching on the Internet, especially teaching a foreign language, would be totally different from that of in a physical setting. Who would provide the necessary equipment to actually deliver the course? How should we market our program? Who should be the school web designer, administrator and technical manager?
 As we were struggling with these problems, a short visit to Vietnam gave us more motivation to proceed with the project. A high school in Vietnam where I had once taught had asked us whether we could provide some help in form of year-end prizes for best scholarshipachievers. We wanted to respond to their request. The Internet school had two goals in mind: firstly, to provide Japanese learners with an opportunity to learn an authentic southern Vietnamese language from anywhere, at anytime, and secondly, to provide Vietnamese students with modest financial assistance in the form of scholarship.
The school was modeled on the Distance Learning Program at UCLA and later the program at State University of West Georgia because those schools are the pioneers in the field of distance education, and more importantly they were selected because the Founder of Nguyen School has received degrees in distance education from those schools.
The funding was the hard part since the school received no external financial assistance. To remain independent, I used my own saving. Throughout the operation of the school, I decided not to receive any outside contribution or assistance because I knew that in any Web-related business a quick and timely response to the needs of students was vital and any external financial assistance would no doubt slow down the decision making process. The funding was needed because new computers and related accessories needed to be purchased, school' s site name had to be acquired, a rental server had to be hired, and the ISP monthly fee had to be paid.
We designed the school web site interface simple but yet easy and effective to navigate. We had four computers, one iMac, one PowerMac, one iBook and one Sony Vaio. They were connected to each other to provide a network. At one time, a virus contaminated the PowerMac and all data was deleted. Fortunately, the iMac had all the files backed up, so the school continued functioning without interruption. When I was away from home, I took the iBook with me and was in contact with the students at all times.
The textbook was first revised from the one we had used in the physical classroom. However, later we had to start a new one from the scratch because we found that the old textbook was inappropriate for distance education purposes.
We went back to Vietnam in the summer of 1998 to shoot a video for the textbook we had just developed. All the actors in the video were from the school we planned to offer scholarships to. All were in their 11th or 12th class and did a very good job.

We edited our footage by iMovie, saved it in QuckTme and finally compressed it in Cleaner, then burned it in Disc Burner. We did all this using a Power Mac G4.
Ten students were accepted and began their studies in the summer of 1998. In the beginning, it was a mess. Students did not know how to access and explore the course. Our instructions as to how to record and send their voices to us were unclear.   Worst of all, most of our students' computers were Windows and all our course data was based in Macintosh.When they succeeded in sending their pronunciation test to us, most were inaudible. In fact, that was their first experience with distance learning and it was the same for us to use Internet as the medium for instructions..
Initially, we made some mistakes. All students were required to download video clips to watch. In 1998 the broadband Internet connection was rarely heard of. Most of our students connected to the Internet by 33.6kps or 56.6kps and as a result it took a half-an-hour just to download a 3MB video clip. Furthermore, the download process was not functioning smoothly as it had been expected. We corrected the problem on the spot. CD-ROMs were burned and distributed to all students.
After delivering the course several times, we completely renovated the school. First of all, the school name was changed to Nguyen School and we rented our first rental server. We purchased our domain name as nguyenschool.org since we found that it was difficult for people to access our web page with an address such as http://www.neon.com/home/ ywca1287/index.html.   
The school began to operate, and has done ever since, under the auspices of the “Vietnam Support Group”, a Hiroshima-based nonprofit organization dedicated to help street children in Vietnam. Secondly we got a technical manager who dealt with all technical problems to make sure that our students were free of any technical hindrances that would prevent them from successfully completing the curriculum. Thirdly, we re designed our online classroom in such a way that all necessary information was included in a one-week span. In each lesson, students would have an overall preview of the lesson. A short test would follow and finally, a related external web site link was introduced as a learning reference. Each student was given a textbook, a video CD, a set of leaflets containing Vietnamese sentences that they could be hung up on some easily noticeable places such as the refrigerator door, or the dining room wall etc., and one set of instructions on how to use the web site as a place for learning.

 The students came from all walks of life. We had a student who desired to learn Vietnamese solely because her husband was Vietnamese and she wanted to check all his incoming mails that were written in Vietnamese. We had a student who lived in the States and fell in love with a Vietnamese woman there and decided to learn the language to propose to her. We had a graduate student who wanted to learn Vietnamese to participate in his school project. The project was to preserve the Japanese heritage in Hoi An area, Vietnam. Through him, we learnt how Japan was involved in such a cultural heritage perseverance activity in overseas.   We also had a retied doctor in his sixties wanted to learn Vietnamese to enjoy his retirement life. Many of them were in theirs thirties but some of them were in their fifties and sixties. We found there was no correlation between how people well do in the course an their age.
The drop -out rate was only 20%, and 80% of students completed the program. Each week students were required to log into the classroom to download the necessary information to complete their studies. There were eight lessons covered over eight-week. The first week was reserved for resolving any technical difficulty that arose before actually getting down to learning.
During the eight-week course, students are taught listening and speaking skill . The skills they learn are directly related to what they are expected to experience while they are in Vietnam. Learning topics range from greeting to how can a person order a summer rolls dish etc.
In the first week, each student introduced himself or herself, and during this week we formed a bond that lasted throughout the course. The second week and thereafter they watched videos, practiced and completed a short test in both written and speaking format. Students recorded her/his voice and sent it to us. We used a specialized software called " Signalize" to analyze the intonation of student diagrammatically and advised them by video clips and audio methods as how to improve their pronunciation.

We set up a bulletin board system (BBS) as a place for communication. We encouraged questions from the student regarding the content of the course, as well as about Vietnam in general. Our policy was “no question is a stupid question” and all questions were carefully handled. There were a lot of questions from the students and students answered each other' s questions according to their experience learning Vietnamese. Some questions included those along the lines of: What is the best method to learn Vietnamese? Where can one purchase a Vietnamese-Japanese dictionary? Information regarding things about Vietnam was lively exchanged among students.
Some questions asked were: Where can one find cheap handicrafts in Vietnam? What is the best restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) to enjoy summer roll (a favorite dish for Japanese). Questions about grammar were explained in writing. On the other hand, questions about pronunciation were explained in video clips and in audio clips.
One student reported that he put the Vietnamese-language leaflets in his rest room and in his bedroom so that he could be sure that he looked at them at least once a day. Another student told us that she made it a habit to always greet her husband in Vietnamese during the eight-week course. Almost every day there was a new input at BBS and this is what makes it the brain of the class.
We set up an office-hour every Sunday night. If BBS is the brain of the class, the office-hour is the heart of the class. Student would log into the chat room and communicate to each other asynchronously. All questions were discussed and answered immediately.
 At one time we had a student from Australia and she log into the chat room every Sunday night, 2 hour behind Tokyo time. Here is what she said about the school: “While there are  many places that taught Northern accent Vietnamese, to be able to learn Southern accent Vietnamese at Nguyen School is a wonderful thing and my knowledge of computer was improved after completing the program. I enjoy the office-hour very much .”
One frequent question asked by students when they first apply to enroll in the program was: “Do I have to be versed in how to use computer to enroll in the program?” Our reply was always simple “No. If you know how to make a telephone call then you can complete the course without any difficulty. You do not need any special software. You do not need to download Yahoo Messenger or any other messenger service to enroll in the course. You need only one freeware that is Apple' s QuickTime to watch video clips. All you need is a connection to the Internet and that' s it. ”. The reason we have chosen QuickTime is its compatibility with both Windows and Macintosh and for its superior performance compared to Windows Media or Real Networks.   As broadband connections proliferated, we actually broadcasted live lectures over the Internet by using Channel Storm' s Live Channel software. The students would hookup their computers into the Internet and watch our instructor teach in real-time. So far, as far as we know, there isn't any other school that broadcasts their courses live over the Internet except us. We are proud of the fact that we are the pioneer in the utilization of real-time broadcasting in distance education. 
A student from Shiga Prefecture after attending such a live broadcasted lecture commented “It is beyond my imagination that I could watch and listen to the instructor' s  lecture synchronously as far away as Hikone with a single mouse click. It is amazing”.
During the eight-week long program, students had the opportunity to talk to the instructor directly over the phone. During the one-hour phoning session, pronunciation was checked, complicated grammar was explained in detail and inquiries about the content of the course were accepted.
One student from Fukuoka expressed her feeling after participating in such a telephone session “I felt sweat falling down my forehead as I tried to pronounce the  Vietnamese accent correctly. I was concentrated so much on the pronunciation that I forgot the time. I appreciated very much having an opportunity to listen to the instructor's pronunciation. On question-and-answer session, my heart was beating fast because I tried my best to answer the instructor' s questions regarding the lesson. I learnt a lot from the telephone session.”
Since all the staff were holding a daytime job, we rarely met with each other (oh yes, we actually did meet once every six month to go drinking). Instead we held a meeting via the Internet. Each member of staff had a camera attached to his/her computer and we communicated while looking at his/her face on the computer. We believe that by holding meeting in this way will save time and frank discussion can be realized. We believe that conducting a meeting over the Internet will not replace face-to-face meeting but it can save time and money for most of the meetings that do not necessitate meeting face-to-face.

Since completing the course, many of our graduates have visited Vietnam, have continued their volunteer work and have reported to us that they had a good time in Vietnam by using what they had learnt at Nguyen School. One eventually married a Vietnamese. One student got excited when she told us that she was moved because she could understand some conversations in the Vietnamese movie "Three Seasons".

One student from Aomori Prefecture said “I became more and more interested in Vietnam after attending Nguyen School and the fact that I am able to learn Vietnamese while living as far away as in Aomori is the best thing I could ever had”.

Another student in Tokyo stated “ I enjoyed the course very much. The fact that Ican learn Vietnamese wherever I live is the most attractive feature of the course ”.
Friendships were formed during the eight-week program and students expressed desires to keep the bond going on even after the course was over. We set up a Bulletin Board System and a Chat Room for alumni. Once the course was over, students were directed to the alumni BBS and the Chat Room and they kept communicating to each other even after graduating from the course.

In September 2000, we organized the first reunion of Nguyen School alumni at a restaurant in Vietnam. Since this is the first time we met with each other in person, nobody knew each other by face. The fact that was the first time we saw each other even if we had communicated with each other during the eight-week program excited us all. We talked about our experiences in learning a foreign language at Nguyen School, how can we improve our program for the future classes and many other things.

 All the proceeds derived from the tuition fees have been channeled to create scholarships for high school students in Bien Hoa city. So far, there have been 50 students who have received the scholarships. We handed our donation directly to the principal of the school and we made sure that the donation went to the hands of the would-be receivers.
We have also received many requests from English-speaking students requesting us to offer the same format of instructions using English as the medium of instruction. We want to respond to these requests, but considering the fact at present we have no adequate human resources or financial backup to do the work, we appreciated but had to decline their requests. We are however trying our very best to offer the same course in English in the future.   People sometimes asked us:“Do you break-even?”. Well, honestly speaking we are still in the red because of the high cost in maintaining the operation of the school. But considering the fact that we did it without a generous financial backup, and that with everything was done in-house from the website creating and curriculum designing to movie editing, we have provided an opportunity for students around the
Presenting awards to student in 2004 world to learn Vietnamese and at the same   time provided scholarships for more than 200 Vietnamese high school students, we want to say that “we are successful”.
Acknowledgment
 We sincerely appreciate the following companies that generously donating their software for us to use in our daily activities: 
Eric Boehnisch-Volkmann of DevonThink Technologies : http://www.devon-technologies.com/ *DevonThink : Best Information Manager for Mac OS X *DevonAgent : Intelligent Internet Research Assistant
Philip Goward and Greg Scown of SmileOnMyMac : http://www.smileonmymac.com TextExpander: Best TimeSave utility for Mac OS X It saves you countless keystrokes with customized abbreviations for your frequently-used text strings and images.  Thank you very much.