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This paper presents a case study of a unique seminar/workshop which was jointly organised by Brawijaya University (UNIBRAW) in Malang, East Java and Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia in early 1996. The purpose of this event was to share Indonesian and Australian experiences in, and understandings of, policies and practices for improving university teaching and learning. Initially, the paper gives a brief overview of Indonesian higher education and academic staff development. It then provides a brief description of the seminar/workshop. Attention is drawn to the program of joint Australian/Indonesian presentations (on defining, planning for, and achieving, quality teaching and learning), the attendance (over 200 Indonesian university managers, staff developers, researchers and lecturers from 72 public and private universities and from places as far distant as Irian Jaya and North Sumatra), the workshops (on developing short and medium term strategies for improving teaching and learning) and the outcomes of the event. The paper concludes by summarising the participants' feedback and discussing some issues arising from this experience.
The Indonesia archipelago of 13,600 islands has a population of over 185 million served by 46 public universities and hundreds of private universities. The university system has a distinctly Indonesian ethos of nation building and national development. The objectives of higher education are:
Despite high course fees and parental dissatisfaction with their own formal education, parents tend to send their offspring to university, often without consideration of their talents and interests, in the belief that degrees confer social status and material wealth (Susanto, 1985). The students in turn tend to select programs which promise better jobs and higher salaries (Suparman, 1992, p.48).
The universities offer four-year Sarjana (S1) degree courses, two-year S2 courses leading to masters' degrees (Pascia Sarjana) and S3 programs leading to doctorates.
Indonesia provides access to higher education through public universities, licensed private universities and the open university, Universitas Terbuka, which in 1995 had 353,000 students. Like other nations, Indonesia is endeavouring to ensure more quality, efficiency, effectiveness, relevance to community need and equity in university teaching and learning while adapting to the challenges of globalisation and constraining higher educational expenditure.
Generally, there is concern regarding undergraduate students' performance and completion rates and the need for more postgraduate studies. The 1985-1995 Higher Education Development Plan stressed the need to develop the knowledge and skills of academic staff and produce academic leaders who can guide and motivate staff (Ranuwihardjo, 1985) but relatively few lecturers hold doctorates and opportunities for postgraduate study are limited by budget constraints. Low salaries and the need to supplement incomes through additional external employment impact on staff commitment to teaching and learning. There are few textbooks in the medium of instruction, Bahasa Indonesia, and the teaching, library and computing resources are such that traditional didactic methods prevail.
Until 1985, university teachers had been trained through a semester-long, theory-based program (Akta V). In 1986, the Director General of Higher Education replaced this with a more practical AA course which is designed to help senior staff improve their knowledge and skills in instructional design, classroom delivery, assessment and evaluation. Cannon and Widodo (1994) noted that the AA program focused mainly on instructional design and needed further development in its delivery and management components. The program has since been revised by the Inter-University Centre for Improving and Developing Instructional Activities (IUC-IDIA) at Universitas Terbuka. IUC-IDIA also co-ordinates the PEKERTI short course introduced to help junior staff in 1993. A number of educational experts, teachers and administrators from various universities in Indonesia were invited to contribute to the developmental stages of the AA and PEKERTI programs.
The AA and PEKERTI programs appear to be well received by faculty but are still being formally evaluated (Mangindaan, 1996). The programs are presented by 'core teams' of faculty who combine this work with their more mainstream teaching duties. The Director General of Higher Education is now strongly encouraging the establishment of Centres for the Development of Instructional Activities.
In another important recent initiative, the Ministry of Education and Culture in 1995 invited the then Chair of the Australian Committee for Quality Assurance in Higher Education, Professor Brian Wilson, and the Vice Chancellor of Northern Territory University, Professor Mal Nairn, to conduct a Quality Audit workshop for senior Ministry officials and University Rectors. The Minister subsequently requested the Directorate to investigate the case for some form of audit of the universities.
Twelve months' planning went into the program structure and content to ensure educational and cultural congruity in the Australian and Indonesian presentations. The Australian presenters were Curtin's Deputy Vice Chancellor, the Head of the TLG (Co-coordinator of the seminar/workshop), two senior staff from the TLG and the 1996 CAUT National Teaching Fellow from the School of Applied Physics at Curtin. The Indonesian Co-coordinator was the AA core team coordinator at UNIBRAW and the presenters were senior Indonesian academics with experience in policy-making for, and managing, staff development.
The two-day seminar was designed to:
The event was held in January 1996. It attracted 204 participants from 31 of Indonesia's 46 public universities and 41 of its private universities and from 22 cities across the islands of Sumatra, Java and Sulawesi and the province of Irian Jaya. Full details of the program are given in the seminar/workshop proceedings (Latchem, Hartono & Purnomo,1996). These proceedings were developed to ensure maximum dissemination of the Indonesian/Australian presentations and participants' conclusions and recommendations. Subject to the approval of the Director General of Higher Education, these proceedings will also be distributed to a wider group of senior managers, staff developers, researchers and teachers.
Overall, although the brief of Indonesian academics is to teach, research and provide community service (Cannon and Widodo, 1994), the participants observed that in their universities, research and community service were accorded higher priority than teaching and learning, and that this was reflected in funding patterns. They identified a major and unmet need for further study into teaching and learning, especially amongst staff who have undertaken basic educational development programs. This finding appears to be confirmed by the high levels of attendance and engagement by participants, levels which far exceeded the organisers' expectations.
As shown in Table 1 below, responses to the Likert-type questions suggest that the case studies, strategies and actions discussed by the Indonesian and Australian presenters were perceived as relevant and applicable to the Indonesian context. However, although the program had been designed to allow for discussion and summaries of the main points, the evaluation shows that participants were still concerned about time constraints on the question and answer sessions.
| Item content | Means and standard deviations of responses* | |
| Mean | Standard deviation | |
| Content/presentation of seminar | ||
| Relevance to the development of teaching and learning | 4.42 | 0.78 |
| Material mastery | 4.48 | 0.60 |
| Delivery method | 4.18 | 0.70 |
| Response to questions | 4.20 | 0.93 |
| Organisation of seminar | ||
| Seminar rooms | 4.48 | 0.82 |
| Time scheduling | 4.13 | 0.84 |
| Speakers' time allocation | 3.83 | 0.88 |
| Questioners' time allocation | 3.35 | 1.12 |
| Conclusion in each session | 3.49 | 0.97 |
| * Scoring 1 - 5 (max: 5) | ||
Responses to other questions indicated that 98% of the respondents saw need for on-going exchange of information between Indonesian staff developers, 96% saw need for more actualisation and operationalisation of the kinds of ideas that the event had generated, and 91% hoped for similar events to be organised periodically. The participants saw a great potential for inter-institutional and international collaboration in researching teaching and learning in accord with Indonesian needs and circumstances.
The participants also identified some major impediments to improving teaching and learning. They observed that appropriate forms of leadership, action and support were not always forthcoming from senior management. They felt that university managers needed to pay more heed to monitoring the quality of learning processes and outcomes, improving the professionalism of the teachers and recognising and rewarding good teaching and good teachers. They also felt that new policies were needed to ensure that teaching and learning were more responsive to the rapidly changing needs of society and challenges of globalisation.
The participants felt that the task of teaching in Indonesian universities was becoming increasingly demanding and multi-faceted. Teachers were required not only to master teaching material and educational theories and apply and assess these but to exemplify morality and integrity. The participants re-affirmed that more opportunities were needed for masters' or doctoral studies. They saw imperative and urgent need for staff development. They acknowledged that the AA and PEKERTI programs helped to build teaching competencies but felt that more advanced staff development programs were also needed to improve lecturers' understanding of teaching, learning, evaluation and assessment, improve student learning outcomes and achieve greater efficiencies in the system. They also agreed that programs were still needed to help staff fulfil their research and community service obligations.
The participants felt that there was a lack of a vision of, and commitment to, quality teaching among senior management within the institutions. There was a need to convince senior managers of the need to provide adequate funding for staff development and associated educational evaluation and research. Support was also needed for inter-institutional forums or regional seminars on teaching and learning. It was acknowledged that such events could be better organised. Some educational seminars are conducted without clear and precise objectives, planned outcomes or follow-up activities. It was suggested that successful seminars depended upon identifying 'early adopters' and using these as affiliates or change agents and involving senior managers in planning or as 'champions'.
The participants saw merit in the concept of appropriately staffed and resourced university staff development centres. Their responses showed support for the idea of research and evaluation informing managers and teachers about best practice and ways of improving teaching and learning. They saw the need for research and evaluation in regard to the AA and PERKETI programs and staff performance as a consequence of these programs. They saw merit in studies into ways of institutionalising teaching and learning improvement and motivating and rewarding good teachers. They saw need for research into the validity and reliability of some of the current classroom research and student evaluation instruments. They also felt that more research and comparative studies were needed into the effectiveness and appropriateness of various learning models and educational technologies. They observed that such educational research needed to be strongly and continuously supported by the institutions. At present, the free-flow of ideas through management levels and across disciplines can be inhibited by institutional bureaucracy.
The participants also discussed the issue of obtaining and keeping good teachers. They felt that the criteria for appointing new lecturers needed to be more explicit and rigorous. They were also concerned that due regard should be given to teaching capability and interpersonal skills in all judgements about staff recruitment, pre-service training, appointments, assignment to duties and promotion.
As Indonesian universities move to establish educational development centres, it will be interesting to see whether these are conceived as reactive service providers or are mandated to be more proactive and interventionist. Cannon and Widodo (1994) believe that Indonesian educational development centres should have a positive role in leading and influencing opinion and achieving more substantial support for the role and status of teaching. Suparman (1996) envisages such centres as providing the thinking for ways of improving the competence of the lecturers, achieving a greater sense of professionalism, and generating 'peer group' activities to ensure that lecturers feel that they are involved in an educational service. Latchem, Parker and Radloff (1996) have described how the Curtin University Teaching Learning Group fulfils a leadership as well as a service role and addresses political as well as teaching issues. Beaty (1995, p. 149) advocates a model of staff development which operates both at the policy and the practical level. She sees the need for a 'ginger group' to add ' heat and spice to the debate about priorities' and 'to keep staff development needs and issues firmly on the agenda of faculties, service departments and the directorate'. Professor Gordon Stanley, Director of the Australian Higher Education Council, sees a paradox in the fact that institutions that are established to transform the mind and preserve and extend knowledge do not always apply an intellectual rigour towards their own processes of development as institutions. He sees need for staff developers to focus on the creation of cultures which support institutional goals and strategic directions and the development of leadership and management. He fears that a narrowly defined concept of academic staff development will confine it to a peripheral role, limited to delivering low level training programs (Campus Review, 1995).
In the Indonesian context, leadership and change roles for academic staff developers may be constrained by the centralised and hierarchical nature of the university system. Cannon and Wiidodo (1994) observe that staff development in Indonesian universities is currently more oriented to national development goals than to individual or institutional priorities. However, staff development may be able to work at the policy level where there is a strong nexus between an educational development centre and a senior academic manager such as a Vice Rector (Academic).
There are encouraging signs that the Indonesian government, senior managers and the university communities are becoming more interested in finding ways of institutionalising the improvement of teaching and learning. It is hoped that the participants in this seminar/workshop will continue to demonstrate their commitment to implementing those ideas which were raised in the seminar/workshop and are within their power to put into practice.
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| Authors: Colin Latchem, Teaching Learning Group, Curtin University of Technology, Australia. Email: c.latchem@info.curtin.edu.au
Timotius Hartono, Faculty of Administrative Sciences, Universitas Brawijaya, Indonesia. Fax: 0015-62-341-565420 Lesley Parker, Teaching Learning Group, Curtin University of Technology, Australia. Email: l.parker@info.curtin.edu.au Please cite as: Latchem, C., Hartono, T. and Parker, L. (1996). International cooperation in academic staff development: The Universitas Brawijaya/Curtin University experience. Different Approaches: Theory and Practice in Higher Education. Proceedings HERDSA Conference 1996. Perth, Western Australia, 8-12 July. http://www.herdsa.org.au/confs/1996/latchem.html |