Ministry of Education and Culture, Research and Technology Explains the Impact of Digital Platforms for Accelerating Education

The Ministry of Education and Culture, Research and Technology together with global management consultant Oliver Wyman released a report regarding "The Impact of the Role of Technology in the Transformation of Indonesian Education" to determine the use of adopting four platforms in accelerating the education system in Indonesia.

These four platforms include the Merdeka Mengajar Platform (PMM), Education Reports, ARKAS, and SIPLah. It should be noted, this analysis is based on Oliver Wyman's survey of 118.000 teachers and school principals, as well as actual data on the use of PMM, Educational Report Cards, ARKAS, and SIPLah.

Meanwhile, currently the primary and secondary education ecosystem in Indonesia consists of 437.311 schools (including Early Childhood Education/PAUD), 52,8 million active students, and 3,38 million active teachers.

"In implementing transformation, teachers are required to do this and that, they don't know where to start. This is why this platform exists. Technology plays a role in scaling this process. One of the important things in transformation is changing competencies, we must have the right to make changes ," said Minister of Education, Culture, Research and Technology Nadiem Makarim at the launch of the report in Jakarta (6/12).

Before talking about adopting the Ministry of Education and Culture, Research and Technology platform, Oliver Wyman discovered several main challenges in the education system in Indonesia which caused the low level of education in Indonesia. First, implementing a curriculum that is in nature One-Size-Fits-All resulting in school awareness of the importance of adapting learning strategies is also low.

Second, the "comfort zone" mentality is considered to hinder teacher motivation to improve the quality of learning. Third, access to quality training is limited because teacher training facilities are not evenly distributed and the training management system is still decentralized.

Hendy Kurniawan representing Oliver Wyman Indonesia added three other findings, namely access to the education ecosystem, geographical factors in remote areas, and platform adoption. According to him, each province has different aspects of capability and quality of talent.

"However, adoption of this platform encourages them to become independent, shaping their behavior and mindset new. Initially used to being dictated to, now I have the freedom to learn. "The availability of content and government support encourages them to develop independently," he explained.

This report states the need for technological intervention to resolve these challenges considering that it will take decades to realize systemic transformation. To make this happen, UNESCO even recommends that it does not need sophisticated technology to have an impact, but specific technology according to the context.

Platform adoption

A number of countries have utilized technology platforms to improve the quality of their education systems. This report gives an example of Singapore through the Student Learning Space (SLS) platform which functions to provide educational resources, assessment tools and various features to monitor student progress.

Meanwhile Estonia developed a platform called eKool which allows schools to facilitate communication and collaboration between students, parents, schools and regulatory bodies.

In Indonesia, the four platforms above are reported to have received enthusiasm from the education ecosystem. The claim is that as of September 2023, PMM has 2,3 million users, of which 83% come from G-12 schools (Elementary, Middle School, High School).

Then, data from the Ministry of Education and Culture noted that around 220 thousand schools had registered with ARKAS. Almost 100% of all primary and secondary level schools, and around 150 thousand primary and secondary level schools (around 70%) have login in SIPLah as of early November 2023.

From the results of the analysis and survey, several impacts highlighted in this report include almost 60% of respondents revealing that they have used more than three features in PMM. These findings indicate that teachers are active in exploring the features on the platform. Meanwhile, 40% of respondents admitted that they were more focused on studying the "Independent Curriculum", "Teaching Toolkit" and "Independent Training" features.

The survey results also revealed that PMM was able to increase the number of training participants by 4,1 million participants as of November 2023. This number has increased 7 times from the realization in 2019 which was only 20% of the total 3 million teachers in Indonesia. Then, more than 40% (80 thousand) teachers in 3T areas (frontier, outermost and disadvantaged) have used PMM to access learning materials.

The use of ARKAS, which is designed to reduce the administrative burden on teachers, was also reported to save up to 5 hours of time according to 40% of respondents. Of the total time savings, 46% of teacher respondents admitted that they could improve the quality of teaching.