Page 15 - Universitas Terbuka Center of Excellence In Asia 2010 and The World 2020 (A Journey Towards a Leading Open and Distance Education Institution 1984-2008)

Chapter 8 gives an account of developments in cooperation and

partnership. From the beginning Universitas Terbuka (UT) has been designed as
a unique institution of higher education . It is a non-conventional, distance higher

education institution which does not have its own facilities as conventional or
face-to-face institutions. Therefore, UT needs various types of external resources
to facilitate its operations management. UT does not have the sufficient

resources of its own to support its distance education system. For this reason, it
is appropriate to consider UT as a higher education institution that manages

resources available internally as well as externally. UT can operate well with the
support from its partner institutions. Nowadays UT cooperation and partnership
have become more complex in line with the development science, technology,
and the changing needs of the society. Broadly speaking , there are three types

of cooperation with UT relating to academic development, operational activities,
and student recruitment.

Chapter 9 illustrates development of certification and accreditation .
Since 2001 , concrete effort and actions to improve the quality of UT services

have been taken, including implementation quality assurance system . This was
initiated with the establishment of the Quality Assurance System Committee in

October 2001 , with the mandate to study the draft of the "Quality Assurance
Framework" developed by the Asian Association of Open Universities (AAOU) .
The team finally adopted the draft "AAOU Quality Assurance Framework" as

reference for the UT Quality Assurance System (UT, 2002) , which was
subsequently disseminated and introduced to the management and staff during
the National Coordination Meeting in April 2002. At the later stage, the UT

Quality Assurance Framework was further elaborated in the forms of documented
systems, procedures, and work instructions which are necessarily vital to the UT
operations. External evaluation was conducted by inviting external evaluation

agency, the National Agency for Higher Education Accreditation (BAN PT) and
two international institutions namely "International Council for Open and Distance

Education (ICDE)" and "International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO)".

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