Over the years humanitarian issues have increased in many parts of the world including Indonesia. Such issues drive the need to evaluate Indonesia's engineering higher education curriculum. Aiming to provide a constructive contribution to inherent humanitarian aspects in the engineering education curriculum, this study revisits the teaching and learning programs in each curriculum of three public universities in Indonesia (i.e., ITB, UB, and UGM). The survey was conducted on 112 respondents from higher education providers and quality assurance agency and 43 respondents from the industry. Results show that about half of postgraduate and a quarter of undergraduate programmes have already run humanitarian engineering programs. According to the industry, undergraduates have better average scores in creativity and leadership, while postgraduates have higher average scores in other parameters such as analytical skills, experience in real-life applications, practical skills, and teamwork skills.
TopIntroduction
There are two aspects underlying the need to review the engineering curriculum of higher education in Indonesia. The first is the need for higher education to focus more on axiology than ontology and epistemology. This is motivated by various humanitarian problems due to natural and man-made disasters. Located on the Pacific Ring of Fire (an area with high tectonic activity), Indonesia is faced with the constant risk of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, landslides, floods, and tsunamis (Siagian, Purhadi, Suhartono, & Ritonga, 2014). Those natural disasters inflict serious damage which causing economic losses. Economic losses from natural disasters have been increasing in recent decades especially in disaster prone areas. Future natural disaster losses are expected to increase due to climate change (Botzen, Deschenes, and Sanders, 2019). Hence, both, natural disasters and poverty alleviation are still the main target that must be resolved, as stated in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this context, axiology becomes more contributing than epistemology and ontology.
This article discusses the technical higher education curriculum, especially for three universities in Indonesia: Universitas Brawijaya (UB), Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM), and Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB). Those three universities are Indonesia partner universities in Erasmus+ Enhance Project (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/eng/enhance/). Thus, best practices of implementation higher education curriculum in those universities are being analysed. Due to uncertain future, the higher education curriculum must pay attention to the importance of cultivating value-conscious personality traits, one's motivation, and the ability to self-determination through understanding existential life forms (Kiryakova, Olkhovaya, Melekesov, & Presnov, 2015). The second aspect is related to the competitiveness of Indonesian universities internationally especially with regards to global ranking. In terms of ranking, Indonesian universities are generally still ranked lower than universities in Malaysia and Singapore in the regional context, especially within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) (Volodymyr, 2018). In Asia, UGM is ranked 57 followed by ITB ranked 62 and UB is still ranked 271-280 (QS Asia University Rankings, 2021). Curriculum development does not directly affect the main indicators of ranking but indirectly affects publications, academic reputation, and employer reputation (Albashiry, Voogt, & Pieters, 2015).
There are several significant aspects of curriculum development in higher education. The credit system in higher education in Indonesia is rigid regarding the number of credits for undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. The distribution of credits for each course and the number of courses in the curriculum design influence the average contact and self-study time. The contact time would influence learning outcomes (Mohamed, 2006). Most undergraduate programmes in Indonesia have less than 10 hours per week, while postgraduate programmes have contact time between 10 to 20 hours per week. Methods of teaching and learning are also important issues. Problem-based learning, blended learning, and student-cantered learning are already popular in Indonesian higher education institutions (Zainuddin & Keumala, 2018). However, methods such as flipped classroom, journal club, game-based learning, and other recent approaches are not very popular yet in Indonesia (Farida, Alba, Kurniawan, & Zainuddin, 2019). Another recent issue is related to an effective method of teaching and learning during the Covid-19 pandemic. Covid-19 has strengthened distance learning methods in Indonesia in terms of its system, regulation, and communication technologies in higher education institutions. The initiation of the Merdeka Belajar Kampus Merdeka Programme ('learning freedom': students' right to take courses from other universities, institutions, and/or industries) was also started in the pandemic period (Suryaman, 2020). Based on these backgrounds, this paper aims to describe the potential and problems of community-based engineering education curriculum in the three participated universities (i.e., ITB, UGM and UB), to analyse the existing engineering higher education teaching-learning programmes from the point of view of the three stakeholders, and to introduce new collaborative design of engineering education program in Indonesia, based on the results of the survey.