Page 256 - Universitas Terbuka Center of Excellence In Asia 2010 and The World 2020 (A Journey Towards a Leading Open and Distance Education Institution 1984-2008)

materials, learning support services, assessment of student learning, and
certification , all of which have been established to meet the needs and in

accordance with the necessity and characteristics of the UT Study Program . In
its continual growth, UT has developed its operations system as follows.

Regular System

At the beginning , UT applied a semester course package system for the
students of Regular Program . This system was felt to be unsuitable because it

was inflexible , it did not give freedom to students who wished to finish their
studies quickly, and it complicated them when they had to retake the courses in
which they failed. Therefore, UT changed it into a free registration system for the

students of the Regular Program. In this system students have freedom to take
any courses as long as they are in the curriculum and the examination schedules

of the courses do not overlap in the same semester. Students were also not
obliged to buy learning materials. The difficulty which was felt until this moment
of writing with this operations system was the way to pred ict the needs and the

distribution of learning materials, and also the way of implementing face-to-face
tutorial services because students are not obliged to buy learning materials and
the courses taken by students vary in each semester.

PGSD System

The operations system of the In-service Primary Teacher Education

Program (PGSD) has been established in accordance with the necessity and
characteristics of the program . In this system , students take a course package
based on the semester sequence. They are obliged to buy or own the learning

materials, and they can retake the course(s) that they fail in the examination .
This system has made easier to predict and distribute the learning materials and
to form study groups for face-to-face tutorials.

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