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Smart universities: Building new ecosystem for quality education
The “freedom to learn, independent campus” (MBKM) policy has forced higher education institutions to transform from the inside out, not merely make cosmetic changes as we have been for decades.
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Students attend in-class learning in compliance with the health protocols on April 7, 2021 at 11 March State University in Surakarta, Central Java. (Antara/Maulana Surya)
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n January 2020, the education minister launched a new national standard for higher education. The ministerial regulation redefines learning and knowledge creation in higher education and opens more possibilities on how a university is run, evaluated and financed.
After two years, it is time to see how far the policy has driven the changes it was expected to generate.
Central to this policy is a new learning pathway, known as Merdeka Belajar Kampus Merdeka (MBKM) meaning “freedom to learn, independent campus”. This gives undergraduates the freedom to complete up to 40 percent of their compulsory 144 credits from outside conventional lectures, for example through internships or fieldwork.
The goal is to ensure that students acquire skills and knowledge that are relevant to real-world demands by the time they graduate and transition to the world of work and professional society.
Highly reputable Indonesian universities, such as the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) in Bandung, West Java, the University of Indonesia (UI) in Depok, West Java, and Gadjah Mada University (UGM) in Yogyakarta, have consistently adapted and scaled up their educational services based on real-life dynamics, which has enabled them to produce highly competitive graduates.
Unfortunately, many universities in the middle and lower rankings are not equally ready to embrace graduate competitiveness as the most realistic indicator of institutional “quality”. For too long they have found refuge in a wide range of “facades”, such as excellent learning facilities and the academic reputations of their teaching staff, which they “exchanged” as representations of quality. While these elements matter, they should be seen as part of a comprehensive support system instead of an actual measure of quality.
The new policy has strategically shaken up this refuge by returning students to the place they should be: the center of a university’s investment.
