LookAtVietnam – ”Just a click and you’ll enter our virtual knowledge world which will enable you to make every dream come true,” ABCDoneline.vn, an online study website for Vietnamese high-school students, claims.

Students in Ha Noi prepare for university entrance examinations. Many of them do not choose traditional preparatory classes, but instead learn online.

Instead of going to the traditional, cramped preparatory classes, however, more and more are taking online courses offered by websites like ABCDonline that are mushrooming. But educators are raising the alarm about these websites’ lack of credibility and obsolescence.

“Though several websites like thaytro.com.vn and hocmai.vn are very good and attract a large number of students, many websites either post anonymous or unverified writing samples or provide grossly inadequate, outdated, and unreliable information. If students use these sources of knowledge without double checking, they might fail,” warns Nguyen Thi Cuc, a literature teacher at the HCM City-based Truong Chinh high school.

Dang Quoc Trong, a 12th grade student from Binh Duong province, blamed study websites for wasting his time by posting lessons that have been discarded by the Ministry of Education and Training.

“The ministry recently amended our text-books, but most study websites did not pay attention to it,” he said.

Worse still is that writing samples on several websites are badly written and clearly a hodgepodge of copy-pasted stuff from other well-known websites. Needless to say, none of these websites quote their sources.

Plagiarised

Nguyen Tan Trung, a chemistry teacher offering interactive tutorials online at HTV4, complained that most of the lectures on his website had been re-used without acknowledgement.

“They often copy my lectures and upload on their websites. But very few websites are good enough to include my name; most of them simply ignore it,” he said.

A quick Google search turns up around 20 Vietnamese websites for online learning. Surprisingly, only two or three are free, with the rest requiring prepayment. Students have to buy cards costing VND50,000-100,000 to access them. Some websites such as ABCDONLINE.VN even offer home delivery.

Most of these websites claim their services to be the best and use fancy slogans.

“We have very experienced teachers. If you want to pass the university entrance examination, join us,” invites www.thilado.

Several websites even claim to have access to past test papers set by the Ministry. But Dr Nguyen An Ninh, head of the Ministry’s Examination and Education Quality Accreditation Department, denied this, saying the ministry had no links with any of the websites.

“Their claims are absolutely untrue.”

“Since the websites are not regulated, students should be very careful if they want to achieve the best academic results,” he said. They should only consider online courses as a supplement to traditional training methods.

“If students rely too much on these websites, they are unlikely to get through university entrance exams because they only provide raw knowledge without practical guidelines,” Trung warned.

VietNamNet/Viet Nam News