Educational technology's place in Indonesia

By Nirwan Idrus

JAKARTA (JP): Much has been said about higher education in Indonesia in the recent past. The new paradigm the government is seeking to implement has concentrated on the mechanisms of changing attitudes and processes. Autonomy, accountability, equity of access and quality have been proposed as aims in the backbone of that new paradigm. Several ongoing loan projects exist at present to help institutions as well as the Ministry of Education and Culture achieve these. It is accepted that it is not easy to achieve such a brave new world considering the limited resources, and an environment which is not conducive anyway.

However, it is inevitable that given the geography and relatively huge number of higher education students in the country, that an unique approach to higher education in Indonesia is needed.

Rapidly approaching globalization, a free-trade era and increasing international competitiveness, is likely to add to the interesting mix of challenges that Indonesia is and will be facing in the next few decades.

The question is whether the traditional approaches to higher education are still acceptable in such a situation, and if they are not, then what other approaches should be used? As I have stated in a number of previous articles in this paper, Indonesia is at a crossroads. Shape up very quickly and smartly or face oblivion. This may sound somewhat harsh, but the situation is more than just critical. We have very little choice and the world out there is rapidly becoming more than just harsh. There is going to be a new law of the jungle out there. Not of the brute force kind, but the brain force kind. This typifies the next century's approach to power.

Forget about becoming a nation to be reckoned with if what you have is simply numbers. A country must have the brainpower, the knowledge plus the ability to harness this knowledge if it wants both recognition as a leading country in the world, and to compete on a level playing field with other countries around the world. Undoubtedly we need many knowledgeable people, that is, people with brainpower -- although not forgetting those who will need to do the jobs, many of which are still manual or semimanual.

But how do we produce these people quickly, and with a quality that can be sustained? We already know that the traditional method is full of holes. Problems galore, from the salary of teachers and lecturers to attitudes, to quality of teaching and learning to alleged massive absenteeism in many state higher education institutions that left students fending for themselves.

As stated earlier, the system needs a complete overhaul. The biggest hurdle is the helplessness that abounds, both at the government level and at the higher education institutional level. The vicious circle is so complete that no one appears game enough to even stretch their big toe outside the circle. Many hide behind government regulations (PP), ministerial decisions (SK Mendikbud), presidential decrees (Keppres), laws (UU) to name a few, while others even quote Indonesian/Asian values as a reason for not changing.

As recently as a few weeks ago in an education article, the weekly magazine Gamma (March 28, 1999) quoted the then director general of higher education Prof. Bambang Suhendro on this issue. In his opinion, the University of Bina Nusantara (a private university in Jakarta) overstepped its mandate in running courses through the Internet and using multimedia as a teaching aid, because the law only allowed Universitas Terbuka (Open University) to run distance education type courses.

University of Bina Nusantara is still the first Indonesian university to achieve international recognition for the quality of its courses, having been granted a ISO 9001 quality standard certification. Its attempt at delivering its course through the Internet and using multimedia is obviously in line with its student-centered learning (or customer-orientation) approach. It is also certainly in line with universities and higher education institutions worldwide. We should really applaud Bina Nusantara for its attempt at bringing Indonesia into the 21st century if not the 20th.

The use of new advanced and educational technologies is without doubt one of the surest ways to achieve the new paradigm alluded to earlier. We should try to use these as solutions to our problems to produce as many educated people as possible in the shortest possible time. Simultaneously, these technologies are allowing the devolution to and empowerment of the people or in this case students, through which the new Indonesia will prop herself up onto the level playing field of the knowledge society.

Should anybody then stop us in this quest? It would appear that only those who do not wish to see Indonesian progress forward and upward, will stop this blessed and even holy endeavor. Only those who are blind to the extremely rapid development elsewhere in the world would stop this progress. Certainly, one would have thought that nobody in the education sphere would do such a thing.

Considering Indonesia's geographical spread, varying levels of education and access to education throughout the archipelago, and the need for a more standardized upgrading of education from Sabang to Merauke, the use of technology and in particular educational technology is simply unavoidable. But what are we talking about when we say technology or educational technology?

With the rapid development of technology itself, it is challenging to give a firm definition of educational technology. In essence it is the use of new methods of learning that improve effectiveness and efficiency of learning for students, while also allowing students to decide for themselves about how, where, when and what they learn. This is another manifestation of democracy that Indonesia has been longing for, for such a long time.

In real terms, both new software (human resources) and hardware are involved. A very simple example is the use of an overhead transparency projector in a classroom, rather than the ubiquitous blackboard. This improves student learning because the material shown on the transparency can be easily photocopied and distributed to the students, in comparison to students laboriously copying material from a blackboard.

Then there is the use of 8mm or 16mm films to supplement classroom lectures. Even this technology has been further refined and modernized. Videotapes are more portable, easier to use and relatively cheaper to edit and revise.

Then, of course, there is the computer which has revolutionized much of our everyday life. The floppy diskette has graduated from the 5 1/4 inch physically less durable diskette to a now universal 3 1/2 inch 1.4Mb memory space and certainly more robust diskette. This has eased a lot of information (and knowledge) transfer. Lately we have seen the "zip" drive disk which can contain a lot more memory than the 3 1/2 inch diskette, which in itself is almost the size of the computer memory of just a few years ago. A typical zip drive disk has 100 Mb memory size -- some 50 times that of a very good laptop computer of just a few years ago.

Then of course, there is the Internet and the World Wide Web which has opened all sorts of possibilities in all fields of endeavor, including education. Communication between two people or many hundreds of people at the same time has become cheaper and certainly quicker than any other previous modes of communication transfer, and can be personalized with ease. This of course has been made possible by the invention of Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone. It is through this medium that all these electrons carrying various messages flow. They are then catapulted off the Earth to another invention, the satellite, which can beam many millions of bytes of information across the world. There is no reason why education cannot take advantage of these new technologies.

The major obstacle is the willingness and ability of humans to use and uncover many more roles for this technology in and for education. The limiting factors are ourselves including, as discussed previously, the various manmade hurdles including, among other things, the law and government rules which hamstring progress.

It is true that the populace has to be protected from the unscrupulous. But surely not from something that has been shown many times to help the progress of humankind. The use of Educational Technology in countries like Indonesia where the window to catch up with the rest of the world, particularly in educating their people, is rapidly getting smaller, is an inevitable priority.

International loans and aid agencies must also take this into consideration when deciding how to prioritize for Indonesia, in addition to the other revolutionary changes to the education system I recommended in previous articles.

Yes, there is a very important place for educational technology in Indonesia, and the quicker we use it pervasively, the sooner Indonesia will join the globalized world.

The writer is an international higher education consultant living in Jakarta. This is a personal opinion only.