ICT and Institutional Learning: an Unnes’ experience

Invited Paper Directorate General of Higher Education Seminar “Designing Quality Learning Landscape in Indonesia” Hotel Menara Peninsula Jakarta 25 – 27 September 2012

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ICT and Institutional Learning: an Unnes’ experience Wahyu Hardyanto Deputy Director (Academic), Postgraduate School Ali Formen Academic Assistant to Vice Rector (Academic) Sugiyanto Director, ICT Development Center Abstract

This paper describes the way ICT has given both opportunity and space for institutional learning in Semarang State University (SSU, unnes.ac.id). It departs from the context of the University introduction of ICT to its management practice. This paper argues that ICT application has transformed the University overall management practice, as well as improved its mobility and contribution at both national and international level. This paper sees no better explanation beyond such transformation other than the fact the University community has engaged in a massive institutional learning process. Apart of this success, however, SSU ICT application has not yet given sound, significant impacts on the University academic programs, which include both teaching-‐learning and research and development activities.

Introduction This paper stands on the belief John Dewey (1997, p. 19) stated almost a century ago in his Democracy and Education; that “we never educate directly but indirectly by means of the environment”. So, just as Dewey believes in the educative nature of physical, social, cultural environment this paper believes that the same principle applies on what the so-‐called information and communication technology (ICT) has offered: virtual environment. It took less than a half decade, Richardson (2010, p. ix) says, for this new environment to be “the mainstream conversation, when it come to politics, media, and business…and education”. Even though many are still worried about the massive intrusion of ICT into our education sites, we finally have to acknowledge that ICT is in fact something unavoidable for our current and future education practice (Carnoy, 2004; Ala-‐Mutka, Punie, & Redecker, 2008).

This is also the context, which some five years ago had encouraged Semarang State University to introduce ICT into its management. Initially rejected, for many assumed that ICT would change their University into a mechanistic, robotic social system, SSU community have now witnessed a shared anxiety whenever, for some reasons, their ICT support system suddenly does not work well. In addition, having felt for quite long period of time that their university is a lower-‐class higher learning institution, SSU community has now found it as one of Indonesian universities with a good performance at national level—for which none is in doubt that, in addition to leadership, the introduction of ICT is the very enabling factor.

Although ICT is believed to be the enabling factor, such transformation would not happen without the SSU community active engagement. In other words,


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for about half a decade SSU community has engaged in a massive learning process. Apart of this success, however, still SSU is faced with some challenges, either those which are related to and resulted from the ICT introduction or those which are related to the overall management. The following paragraphs are devoted to further elaborate these matters. Before coming to that point, however, this paper will firstly provide a brief profile of SSU. Semarang State University at a glance The present-‐day SSU was formally a state-‐owned Institute of Teacher Training and Educational Sciences (Institut Keguruan dan Ilmu Pendidikan). Founded in 1965, the Institute was then given a wider mandate and its status was improved to be university, Semarang State University, in 1999 with six faculties and a Postgraduate School. Two faculties, namely Faculty of Economics and Faculty of Law, were later founded in 2006 and 2007 respectively (Unnes, 2011). As it applies to higher learning institutions in general the main mandates of SSU is to provide teaching and learning, research, and community service.

Currently, there are 31.062 students enrolled in SSU; of this number 2.115 are postgraduate students. The year 2006 is a milestone for the SSU toward what it has self-‐defined a smart campus. For it was the year when SSU for the first time introduced a clear institutional vision of profound influence. The vision defines SSU as “a university which is healthy, outstanding, and prosperous”—Unnes yang sehat, unggul, dan Sejahtera, publicly campaigned as “Unnes Sutera” (Unnes, 2011, p. 8). Thanks to SSU effective leadership, now the vision has not only been a word of aspiration. Indeed, its popular designation, “Unnes Sutera” is now the University official greeting that has further made it a sort of mantra for the SSU community.

In the eyes of those who are unfamiliar with “Unnes Sutera”, the vision seems to not reflect an institutional business of a university, which traditionally should have a strong “academic” smell. But SSU has its own logic: at the end there is nothing for a university to contribute other than prosperity. The business of a university to discover, produce, and transfer of new perspectives, insights, and knowledge, all of these sorts, is meaningless if it is not dedicated to the achievement of the social prosperity. And to achieve this ideal, so the logic of SSU goes, a university must have something to offer: excellence. But, higher education landscape is also intruded by new value, competition—indicated amongst other by the introduction of university rankings (Fahey, 2007)—which is for a developing university as SSU a difficult challenge to handle. In response to this matter, SSU’s is clear: that excellence can never be achieved unless its precondition is met. In SSU point of view SSU, the prerequisite is nothing but the realization of SSU as a “healthy higher learning institution” in the light of good university governance. And this is what it really means by ‘healthy’ in its "Unnes Sutera" jargon (Unnes, 2010b; Wahyudin & Sugiharto, 2010).

In contrast to such idealized healthy state was the SSU situation in the past. “It was full of chaos [kekacauan]” said an SSU middle manager in an English for Executives class to reply to the question “What, in your opinion, did SSU look like in the past?”. This statement might sound exaggerating for many, but it was his real feeling of SSU prior to the introduction of introduction of ICT-‐based management. Officially, the manager’s ‘chaos’ is what SSU formulated as ‘the sick state of being’, in which a ‘healthy higher learning institution’ is contextualized


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and for which ICT-‐based management is seen as a panacea. To put it simply: SSU is a state institution; and like others, it has a standard internal structure and is bound to the same rules and regulations. If this is the case, so why SSU did not perform well as others did. The answer is back to SSU’s lack of supporting, reliable system, a bridge between the policy and its implementation. In this situation, a given policy implementation is always something in the eye of the beholder, which makes, as Gertler and Wolfe (2002, p. 230) say, “what ends up being implemented often differs radically from what the policy-‐makers originally had in mind”—this situation is the “illness” from which SSU wants to free. ICT introduction and institutional learning at SSU To be a healthy organization means that SSU has to offer new, alternative values, knowledge, and practice, in short a breakthrough. Simultaneously, it also has to stop all situations potentially that potentially lead to more severe illness. Thus, as Gertler and Wolfe (2002, p. 13) suggest, “old habits of thought and routines, even some norms and values….have to be destroyed before existing social institutions can assimilate the new knowledge”. To initiate a change unfortunately is not that easy, especially when new institutional values and philosophy are required in one hand and at the same time the institution itself has both at the organizational and individual levels been so immersed in the old values and ways of working. It is important to note that an effective process of change does not stop at the introduction of a new set of idealized values. Indeed, must also embrace changes in the behaviors, attitudes, and activities of the individuals who support it.

Given this difficulty, Watts and his colleagues (2007, p. 13) recommend two possible ways for an organization to introduce and nurture change, the top-‐down and bottom-‐up approach (Figure 1). For the purpose of effectiveness, the models can be combined. Initially, an institution can take the top-‐down model, in which an institution, with the all authorities it possesses, introduces a new idealized state of being. Once, significant changes occurred, and the new tradition within the organization developed, the bottom-‐up can be taken.

Figure 1. Approaches to introducing change (Watts et. al, 2007)

Reading Watts and his colleagues’ suggestion in the context of SSU’ ICT


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application one will find that the top-‐down approach was the initial model to take. This strategy was chosen as a safe way, for SSU main problem in the past was the ineffectiveness of its regulations and policies not their absence. With this stance in mind, SSU saw ICT application as a “supporting tool for the implementation of the existing SSU bureaucracy system” (Unnes, 2010a, p. 4). As a supporting tool, ICT is to be used to make SSU internal management practice faster, easier, more responsive and more.

At this top-‐down stage of change, ICT application within SSU internal management system is seen as an additional aspect to its system and process of academic and administrative bureaucracy (Figure 2). In this understanding, thus, ICT application is seen as tool to make the process of bureaucracy accountable, and thereby the policy implementation will not, as Gertler and Wolfe (2002) worry about, go to the wrong direction. This is done through first of all the translation of SSU academic policy and regulation into ICT-‐based management system.

Figure 2. ICT as supporting element (Unnes, 2010)

Fundamental to SSU’s top-‐down approach of ICT-‐based management development and its following implementation was database integration and normalization. This was done from 2005-‐2007. As this paper has mentioned elsewhere, SSU had experienced a severe ineffectiveness of policy implementation. This has further resulted in unreliable data, in the form, for example, the differences and inconsistencies between the data used at the university level and those used at the faculty level. Such unreliability was also apparent in the forms of conflicts between the actual data and the should-‐be data in accordance to the university policy and regulation. In this situation, students who are per regulation must be dropped out, for example, might still be registered and counted as active students. Unfortunately, similar problems happened to almost all aspects of SSU service, which further led SSU to a “garbage in garbage out” situation.

For data play a critical role in policymaking, this “garbage in garbage out” situation of course is a serious threat for SSU development, especially because quality database is one of the fundamental prerequisite to access government financial support. For this reason, SSU effort to normalize its database is a fundamental decision, and given its centrality SSU calls this effort “the first

ICT

University bureaucracy process

ICT-‐supported bureaucracy process


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millstone” to the later development of its ICT-‐based management. Still a normalized database might be problematic without an integrated access, for the data development and distribution is difficult to control. If this is the case, even an integrated database is useless, and this means SSU efforts to reform its management practice will go nowhere. To overcome this potential threat, therefore, another strategic measure was taken in 2008, that is, information access integration. This was done through the integration of bandwidth management, which previously was done independently by SSU faculties and units. Fundamental to this development is the principle that SSU calls it “centralization of system and decentralization of authorities”. This means that only the ICT Development Center is mandated and allowed to build an ICT-‐based system; yet, all units and individuals are given authorities to use the system in accordance to specific set of privileges.

After three years of its introduction, SSU community learned to feel the benefits of ICT application and trust it, in addition to effective leadership, as a key component of good management practices. This shift had later marked a new chapter in the SSU ICT development, namely from a top-‐down model the bottom-‐up one. This was indicated through the growing aspiration amongst SSU units to improve and expand their ICT performance. In response to this demand, in 2010 fiber-‐optic installment was done covering all areas of SSU main campus. The overall ICT infrastructure design is provided in Figure 3.

Figure 3. SSU overall ICT infrastructure networks

In addition to fiber-‐optic installment, 2010 was also marked by massive development of hot-‐spot zones. This facility is believed to further increase SSU community trust in the benefits of ICT. This has in turn also led to the growth of


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new demands for further ICT applications amongst SSU units. With this situation, it was not surprising, that a year after ICT infrastructure was established in 2010; the 2011 SSU witnessed a massive development of online information management systems. Originally developed to support only the academic service (akademik.unnes.ac.id) in 2007, SSU online information management system has now reached its budgeting system (sianggar.unnes.ac.id), accounting system (siakun.unnes.ac.id) financial management (simkeu.unnes.ac.id), and institutional accountability reporting system (lakip.unnes.ac.id). Online systems were also developed for human resources management and development (simpeg.unnes.ac.id) and student affairs (simawa.unnes.ac.id). This massive development of online information management system has marked a new phase, that is, the fourth millstone, in the SSU ICT-‐based management development. Yet this is not the end-‐point of SSU ICT development. Through continuous development SSU is committed to further improve its ICT access and meaningfulness for of its stakeholders (Unnes, 2012). This will be done through the transformation of the current ICT application into a decision-‐making supporting system and the integration of the virtual space it offers into its academic program; and this will establish the fifth millstone. The overall millstones of SSU ICT development can be seen in Figure 4.

Figure 4. SSU ICT development millstones SSU success story in ICT development has further attracted its external

stakeholders both at local and national levels; for which it is trusted for example by the ministry of education to develop an online system to support teacher and lecturer certification. Seen from the internal side of SSU, this contribution, has given another opportunity for the SSU community to learn about the benefits of ICT application. Above all, they also learn that their institution is no longer a lower-‐class university as they thought before.

It seems there is no better lesson that we can learn from SSU experience other than what many have termed it “institutional learning” (De Geus, 1998; Gertler & Wolfe, 2002; Carayannis, Pirzadeh, & Popescu, 2011) or “organizational learning” (Watts et al., 2007), which is a process by which an organization or institution such as university tries to seek for a better way to improve its performance by introducing a planned change. Carayannis, Pirzadeh, & Popescu (2011, p. 138) define it as “knowledge creation, transfer, absorption, and use by individual or collective actors and leads to changes in their conduct and results in changed institutional arrangements”. De Geus (1998) further emphasizes that such changes must also include the change in the collective mentality of an organization. An organization or institution is seen to engage in an institutional

Expansion of ICT access and its meaningfulness

Data normalization and integration (2005 – 2007)

Information access integration (2008)

ICT infrastructure development (2010)

Information management system development (2010)


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learning when it begins “to question earlier beliefs about the appropriateness of the course of action that they are pursuing and to consider alternative ones” (Gertler & Wolfe, 2002, pp. 15-‐16).

In the case of SSU institutional learning, ICT is both the context and further enabler. It could be seen as a context because SSU started to engage in institutional learning when ICT application is massively introduced into higher education learning institution management. At the same time, for SSU, ICT is the enabler for its institutional learning as it has brought easier ways for SSU to reflect upon its own practice, its strengths and weaknesses, and to formulate the best possible solution to the problems it was faced with. Future direction and challenges to manage There is no success story, it seems, with no challenges to manage; and this is also the case for SSU ICT-‐based management implementation. One of the fundamental challenges to manage is the fact that its spacious, borderless virtual environment does not yet support its academic programs both in terms of teaching-‐learning activities and research and development. There have been of course fundamental changes within the SSU academic circle daily practice in which ICT has become literally unavoidable. Yet this, as indicated through the university overall research and development performance, has not yet shown promising results. In other words, whilst ICT-‐based system has an exponential effect on SSU management practice, its impact on SSU academic sector is still a long journey to go.

For the purpose of improving the ICT application impacts, SSU ICT Development Center has identified the following future needs to meet (Unnes, 2010a). The first is video conferencing infrastructure development. This facility is required especially to meet the real-‐time communication needs, for example for online distance teaching or meeting with international partners.

Secondly, grid-‐network development. This presence of this facility is unavoidable if SSU is willing to improve its ICT impacts on its research performance. Research and development require large computational resources and high performance computing system. This facility can be built from the existing PCs assembled into a high-‐speed local network that delivers large computing power.

Third, backup system reliability. This facility is for storing the data and information managed by information systems. The availability and reliability of this facility is of critical importance, especially to anticipate such unexpected situations of power outage, natural disasters, and not least crucially human errors.

The presence of these facilities in the future however is not the sole guarantee for the improvement of SSU ICT application impacts on its academic performance. Good academic performance somehow requires sound, solid academic tradition that includes but is not limited to such qualities as strong reading habit, and willingness to engage in self-‐independent learning. The development of these qualities requires more than the presence of an online management practice. Indeed, recent studies have shown the importance of physical learning space to support the development of solid academic culture (Boddington & Boys; Weaver, 2006; Holtham, 2008; Cox, 2011). Moreover, a study by Powis (2010) also emphasizes the importance of social space. Physical learning space, unfortunately, is a serious challenge for SSU buildings and overall landscape seem to not fit the modern learning spaces characteristics. Its


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classrooms also seem to be built under the teacher-‐centered pedagogy. In fact today’s young generation demands for more room for participation and initiatives. Radcliffe, Wilson, Powell and Tibbetts (2008, p. 20) say “we can no longer rely on the standards for learning spaces developed over time since the 60s and 70s” for physical space is also a key dimension of learning in universities. The role of virtual space will only be effective if it is accompanied by supportive physical space. Concluding remarks Departing from the context of SSU, this paper shows the role of ICT as a context as well as a driver for institutional learning. Its introduction and integration into the university management is proven to effectively improve the university performance. Whilst the reliance on ICT as a source for learning is now increasing, its application, and the virtual space it offers, however, is not the sole enabling factor to improve a university academic performance. Physical space somehow is critical aspect as it is the real space for us to live. Above all, social and cultural spaces are equally important, for both are the very conditions for learning to take place.


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ICT and Institutional Learning: an Unnes’ experience

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