Wahyu Hardyanto
Deputy Director (Academic), Postgraduate School
Abstract
Introduction
Semarang State University at a glance
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, and 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.
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 and 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 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.
