Page 337 - Universitas Terbuka Center of Excellence In Asia 2010 and The World 2020 (A Journey Towards a Leading Open and Distance Education Institution 1984-2008)

university with excellent characteristics. Some important actions that should be

done in order to make UT an excellent university are as follow.
1. Research and development. Research and development is an area which is

less attractive to distance higher education institutions, although this
condition is getting better from time to time. This is due to the fact that the

focus of most distance education institutions in the world is on expansion and
spreading out their services and scope of learning so that the institutions can

accommodate a huge number of students, as part of national strategy to
increase participation in higher education which is in line with the idea of

higher education for all. Development of distance higher education
institutions should be continually enhanced and every effort should be made

to avoid actions based on intu itions and unnecessary trial and error actions.
Cooperation in research and development can be done in various areas, such

as improvement of institution's performance, improvement of implementation
methods of PT JJ , and basic research in various fields of study, as well as

other areas of priority of the institutions concerned .

2. Quality Assurance. Distance higher education institutions all over the world
have the same interests to continually assure and improve quality and make

every effort to satisfy the needs and expectation of concerned parties for
accountability, reliability and transparency. Quality assurance always

involves self-evaluation and quality assessment, internally and externally.
Cooperation between distance higher education institutions in this area is

expected to facilitate the process of quality improvement through external
comparison of performance and quality. By so doing, UT can assess itself and

tries to put itself in the front line to keep abreast with the progress made by
other similar institutions. If UT has high quality standard or at least is equal

to other leading institutions, various forms of cooperation in numerous areas
can be easily developed and effectively implemented.

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