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View all search resultsAntara/Umarul FaruqThe new education and culture minister, Nadiem Makarim, said that competency and character were two of the most important aspects of education
Antara/Umarul Faruq
The new education and culture minister, Nadiem Makarim, said that competency and character were two of the most important aspects of education. The Cabinet’s youngest minister, who led Gojek from a delivery call center consisting of 20 ojek (motorcycle taxi) drivers to a US$10 billion company with 2 million partners across Southeast Asia, said the education system should be significantly enhanced with the use of technology, which is indeed indispensable in this 4.0 era.
President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo trusted Nadiem to lead this giant leap in Indonesia’s education, which is unfortunately still mired in convoluted problems such as a shortage of teachers, irrelevant vocational education, burdensome curricula and uncompetitive university graduates.
With the reintegration of the Research, Technology and Higher Education Ministry into the current Education and Culture Ministry, which previously supervised only primary and secondary education, the scope of the endeavor has now widened.
There is no question that technology shapes students’ competency — computer-assisted coding to teach basic to advanced logic, for example. But the pressing question is: can technology help shape students’ character? Can teaching virtues such as self-control, honesty, respect and fairness — which contribute to good character — be technically and effectively delivered via technology?
Nadiem’s awareness about the issue of character building, which is the very heart of education, is a good sign that he is at the correct starting point in his ministership.
Adults used to be the filters through which children were exposed to proper values. But now, with mobile gadgets in most children’s hands, that role is largely absent. Children are increasingly outside the reach of adult influence.
For example, open and distance learning, which are now mostly assisted by technology, such as the digital learning management system and massive open online courses, enable students to learn anytime, anywhere — almost without the physical presence of instructors or teachers.
Besides Universitas Terbuka, a university that has provided full open and distance education since its establishment in 1984, other regular higher education institutions have been pushed by the government to introduce open and distance environments in the form of blended learning, which combines offline and online courses.
Basic and secondary education institutions have also been encouraged to apply this system to widen access to education and reach the previously unreachable. In every province there is at least one “hub” school, which acts as a provider of open and distance education for children who have difficulty attending school.
However, unlike other countries such as the United States, China and India, where technology-based open and distance education has earned trust both in the public and private sectors, with students scattered all over the world, making them citizens of an almost unlimited global digital village, Indonesia still has a long way to go.
Despite the push for the use of technology, monotonous teaching is still business as usual. And for most, technology-based education has still not been fully developed, not only due to the lack of infrastructure but also because of unwillingness to depart from the current comfort zone and scepticism about the effectiveness of the pedagogical use of technology.
For example, one educator cast doubt on the ability of technology-based distance education to really help shape students’ characters. The practical absence of adults and the limited physical space for students to interact with each other have raised doubts about whether proper character education is really possible through technology.
Therefore, the current virtual coordination training program, which trains teachers in digital literacy awareness, is instrumental to opening up teachers’ perspectives and should be continued with the ministry’s full support and more extensive teacher involvement.
How about necessary skills for students?
US-based Center for Media Literacy chief executive officer Tessa Jools has proposed what she called “process skills” of knowledge acquisition, problem solving and citizenship for students to be able to “benefit from technology, to manage the risks they encounter, and to make responsible choices on a lifelong basis”.
Hence, the 21st century skills of 4C — communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity — should also consist of citizenship and self-direction skills since students are part of a global village with certain norms and regulations and will interact and collaborate with their peers in other parts of the world.
These process skills, which are deeply grounded in values and character, should be designed in a way that allows students to acquire them through blended or even full online learning.
For example, certain community projects, which promote the values of diversity, can be conducted with the use of empowerment-oriented online platforms.
The use of communication technologies can also help marginalized and disadvantaged young people to develop their identities and learn life skills.
The challenge is to gather the very best of our digital talent — education experts, practitioners and policymakers — to sit together and design a practical and steadfast technology-based education system in which character education is profoundly enshrined.
In other words, innovation with the use of technology and its continuous creative integration into pedagogy, including character development, is a prerequisite for the Education and Culture Ministry to take the giant leap of embracing an entirely fresh look at Indonesia’s education ecosystem.
Another challenge for Nadiem will be confronting the fact that customized and quickly adjustable innovation is almost unworkable within the current rigid government budget regime, where too-strict financial allocation mechanisms mean lawmakers have to constantly navigate a labyrinth of potential legal consequences.
The Finance Ministry needs to ease its financial regulation to give more space and flexibility to other ministries, particularly the Education and Culture Ministry, to use their budget allocation in a way that adapts to emerging change and new innovations and adjusts policy accordingly while adhering to principles of accountability.
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Director of Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization, Regional Open Learning Center and lecturer at the School of Education, University of Sultan Ageng Tirtayasa, Serang, Banten.
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