1) Comprehensive Comments
The evidence provided indicates that the School’s KAIZEN performance was good. In addition to the achievements, we would recommend the following for continuous improvement purposes:
- The School may establish a ‘Teaching Centre’ to help faculty design better syllabi, write course outlines and course goals, and improve teaching delivery.
- Rules on teaching hours and sabbaticals are needed to provide more time for faculty members to do research and publish.
- The School may utilize the ‘online’ platform opportunities to create and offer students more international lectures. This will expose students to the global education environment.
- Staff needs better training, career development, and promotion opportunities.
- The KAIZEN Report indicated that overall, the School had shown good achievement of the action plans. The implementation of the plans was consistent with the School’s mission. Given the progress and achievement of its three-year action plans, the School should be able to identify any new issues to be improved.
- Overall, the School has addressed important points that need to be improved to realize its vision and missions. Some good practices can be observed in the School’s relationships with external stakeholders and their involvement in business education processes, the use of local case studies, and the established internal quality assurance system. Nevertheless, there is certain room for improvement. Further details are provided below.
- Faculty: They need support to do research (and publish) more. This could be in the form of one course teaching relief every few years or a sabbatical semester every few years. A teaching center may help faculty design better syllabi, write course outlines and course goals and improve teaching delivery. Clear, transparent reappointment and promotion procedures/policies would be useful. Incentives for promotion and rewards ought to be articulated.
Students: Based on the online interviews, their English is good, they are articulate, well-motivated. We hope this was a fair representative of the student body. They need support for job search and guidance, so a placement center would be useful. Students will function in a global environment. Providing them with the opportunity for exchange programs would help.
Due to the pandemic, one can easily attend the classes of some other university in a virtual exchange program. Even a simple broadcast would enable students to witness and experience what goes on in a different environment. They can observe the in-class behavior of the students in the other schools, witness the class participation and intellectual exchanges and discussion.
Staff: Staff must be provided opportunities to learn English. It’s a global world. They also need better training, development, and promotion opportunities, supplemented with better financial rewards. The audio connection with staff during our meeting was rather poor, so it is difficult to judge how good they are and what all they need to better serve the School.
The School’s Feedback:
- Ubaya has a Center for Learning and Curriculum Development and regularly conducts training to design effective learning curricula in accordance with existing developmental conditions.
- The School also sets a maximum limit in teaching and provides a “sabbatical leave” for faculty members to enable research and community engagement.
- The School has used an online platform with Moodle which can be accessed at https://uls1.ubaya.ac.id/uls/ and the one that has recently been developed for fully online learning is http://ubayaglobalacademy.com/moodle/
- Staff training has been conducted every semester, and in the future will focus on English proficiency and ICT/digital literacy skills.
- Students will also be encouraged to take 1 semester of online learning abroad.
PRT Responses:
Assessing the effectiveness of the training conducted for staff is vital. The School should keep and organize the required training programs. It is more about the quality of the training rather than its quantity.
2) Good Practices in improvement
The School has an established internal quality assurance system. The School’s good practices in improvement include establishing an advisory board and relationship with the external stakeholders, especially industry and alumni. The faculty members acknowledge the benefit of ‘Team Teaching’ implemented, and many faculty members are also active in local case study writing. These practices benefit students in many ways.
- i: ‘Team Teaching’ helps faculty members to meet their KPIs of teaching, research, supervision, and publication.
ii. The School Management was committed and provided vital support to the faculty members and staff in implementing the action plan to achieve the School’s and the Program’s missions. - The main improvement made by the School is the involvement of external stakeholders, such as alumni and industry, in aligning the curriculum with the needs of the industry. Having an advisory board in this matter is also very helpful to maintain the relevance of the curriculum.
The publication of case studies is another major strength of the School compared to other business and management schools in Indonesia. It is mentioned in the School’s response to the PRT questions that the case studies cover different topics in business and management, such as financial management and management control system. The School needs to ensure that the case studies have more diverse topics and can be used across all or most courses offered by the School. It would also be very nice if the case studies can be employed by other business and management schools in Indonesia in their teaching and learning activities. The School also has an established internal quality assurance system which allows it to monitor the achievements of the action plans in a timely manner. The compliance with ISO 9001:2015 standards has also helped the School in ensuring the quality of all education processes.
PRT enjoyed its meeting with the representative faculty members. Lots of experience and evidence of commitment to the School and satisfaction with their environment.
3) Matters to be noted
- There was no input for Part II: New issues to be improved.
- Some of our suggestions are:
- The need for developing training programs to enhance staff competency, particularly for English comprehension and digital / ICT literacy.
- The need for leveraging the involvement of faculty members in the academic mobility program to increase international collaboration in research.
- The need to measure the effectiveness of English proficiency initiatives for students and staff.
- The School’s and Program’s supporting materials/visuals must be prepared in English or be bilingual.
- The PRT emphasizes that the School needs to pay special attention to the staff’s competence, particularly English comprehension, and digital / ICT literacy. The School might consider intensifying trainings in these matters. With regards to its plan to rely more on online learning and possibly online MM / MBA degree, the School might consider conducting feasibility study to ensure that there is a demand for such programs. Recently, many business and management schools started to offer online master’s degrees, and MM Ubaya should also identify its uniqueness to become more competitive with these online master’s providers. In supporting faculty members to produce high-quality intellectual contributions, the School needs to provide online research database. Since the provision of these databases requires significant financial investments, the School might leverage its close link with the industry and alumni network. The School has taken some measures to improve English proficiency of its students, such as creating a learning environment that can support this.
- The effectiveness of these measures should be evaluated for their improvement in the future. The opportunities of several faculty members to become international visiting professors can also be leveraged to increase research and other types of international collaborations between MM Ubaya and its partner universities. The School also needs to monitor the quality of intellectual contributions produced by its faculty members, by looking at the citation index or H-index. This is important to give a nuanced understanding on the contribution of knowledge development.
- The PRT did not appreciate that some graphs were in a language other than English. It is unnecessary distraction.
The School’s Feedback:
We received two PRT suggestions:
- The need for developing training programs to enhance staff competency, particularly for English comprehension and digital / ICT literacy.
- The need for leveraging the involvement of faculty members in the academic mobility program to increase international collaboration in research.
Our response to the other suggestions is:
- The need to measure the effectiveness of English proficiency initiatives for students and staff: Ubaya has Ubaya Language Center (ULC) where students can take the TOEFL test in ULC.
- The School’s and Program’s supporting materials/visuals must be prepared in English or be bilingual: The School’s website: https://pasca.ubaya.ac.id/home-en/ has been already bilingual. While, the Ubaya Global Academy on http://ubayaglobalacademy.com/moodle/ managed by the Center for Learning and Curriculum Development is not bilingual. Indeed, the Ubaya Global Academy is still in its early stage, so in the future the School will encourage the Center to develop a bilingual site.
PRT Responses:
We believe that there is a strong need for the School to develop a bilingual website of Ubaya Global Academy.