Page 206 - Universitas Terbuka Center of Excellence In Asia 2010 and The World 2020 (A Journey Towards a Leading Open and Distance Education Institution 1984-2008)

of the Post Office in delivering the materials. A significant amount of learning
materials was returned to the UT Headquarters by the Post Office because the

students' addresses were not known or unclear. This could happen not only
because the addresses were incomplete but also the addresses could not be

reached by the Post Office. Especially for the sub district, village or isolated
areas, the learning materials could not be directly delivered to the students'

addresses, because the postal officer could not carry the learning materials
package with more than 10 kilograms in weight using bicycle. The students had

to collect the learning materials packaged on their own directly to the Post Office
after receiving a notice letter from the Post Office. For many UT students,

coming to the nearest Post Office in certain parts of Indonesia was neither easy
nor cheap endeavor, as the students had to spend extra time and allocate extra

budget to get the learning materials from the Post Office.
The UT failure in implementing the new operations system resulted in

delays for many students to get their learning materials and some of them did not
receive the learning materials even until the semester examination was

administered. As the result, UT received 18,000 letters of complaints from the
students for not receiving the learning materials , and hundreds of students came

directly to the UT Head Office everyday to put forth their complaints . Some
students sent open letters to the mass media expressing their dissatisfaction of

UT services . This condition caught the attention of some members of Indonesian
Legislative Assembly, so that the UT top management was invited to give

clarification .
The UT inability to handle students' complaints quickly and improve its

services effectively had impact on the decreasing number of new student
registration in the next semester. The total number of new student registration in

the 1987-1 semester decreased drastically from 46 ,910 students in 1985 to
16,135 students. This total number of student registration was the lowest ever

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