COVID-19 and higher education in Vietnam: Systematically rethinking the quality assurance system and practices towards the ‘new normal’ in post-crisis era

COVID-19 has spawned a critical shift in the landscape of higher education (HE) worldwide, entailing transformations of practices across the field, in which quality assurance (QA) for HE has also evolved to both reflect and stay adaptive to the ‘new normal’ formed during and beyond the pandemic. Against the COVID-19 context, this paper retells some of the existing debates for Vietnamese QA and accreditation activities, as well as identifies emerging challenges in QA practices in the post-pandemic era. Theoretically, the paper contributes a conceptual tool to examine the QA of the Vietnamese HE system, embracing three dimensions of teaching and learning, inputs and outputs. This further underpins our inquiry for QA practices in the Vietnamese HE context which has been scaffolded and developed accordingly. Drawn from a critical review and analysis of emerging policies and existing literature, practical implications and projections for the directions of Vietnamese QA in the future will be provided. This paper presents a timely insight for the process of policy-making and the implementation process of QA in Vietnamese HE during a time of uncertainties and looks towards building resilience to future crises.