Vietnam is an oriental-culture country with 4,000 years of history and many unique attributes
in its educational system. Therefore, the human characteristics, habits and psychology of
Vietnamese students are very much different from those of Western countries. In addition,
the knowledge and learning methodologies they acquire from high school are also different,
which greatly affect the quality of their higher education adaptation, especially when it comes
to CDIO implementation? This paper analyzes the difficulties of adopting CDIO in Vietnam
with regards to certain shortcomings of Asian students in creativity, adaptability and flexibility.
Generally speaking, the major shortcoming of Asian as well as Vietnamese students is their
passivity and warriness against new ideas. This usually leads to passive learning which is
the opposite of what CDIO is asking for: active learning and teamwork. In high school, Asian
and Vietnamese students rarely have the chance to express their ideas about the learning
subjects - they simply accept and memorize whatever their teachers have to say. The high
schools also lack courses which help develop their personal and interpersonal skills. And yet,
Asian and Vietnamese students also have certain good qualities in that they usually study
very hard, having strong knowledge of basic sciences, and possessing the ambition of
“lifelong learning”. With this type of students, more than often, we have to employ certain
techniques and approaches to promote their qualities and at the same time, to help them
overcome their shortcomings in terms of Asian cultures and their high school background. In
order to implement CDIO in Asia in general and in Vietnam in particular, the universities need
to pro-actively set up additional coursework or add-on modules to help guide and train their
students about active learning, teamwork, creativity, etc. College instructors, on the other
hand, need to encourage students to present themselves in class, to share ideas, and to
show appreciation for the ideas of others. After two years of CDIO adoption at our university,
we have managed to come up with a great number of techniques and approaches to help our
students become more active, creative, and teamwork-oriented. Our sharing of different
experiences will be useful for universities and colleges in Asia or for those under the same
cultural setting like that of Asia, which are attempting to implement CDIO.