Technology for an Irreversible Transformation in Indonesia’s Education System

GovTech Edu works with the Indonesia MoECRT to build a technology ecosystem to create an irreversible transformation for Indonesia’s education system. It includes tech platforms made available for teachers, school principals, university students & practitioners, through products like Teacher SuperApp, Education Scorecard & University Internship Matchmaking Platform. With these, the transformation to improve student learning outcomes becomes more inclusive, data driven & impact-enabling at scale.

Innovation Summary

Innovation Overview

Indonesia has long suffered from a learning outcome crisis, with ~70% of 15-year-old students performing below the minimum competency level in literacy and numeracy skills (OECD, 2018). Over the past few years, the latest PISA survey ranks Indonesia 71 out of 77 countries. Today’s challenges to Indonesia’s education system lie in fundamental and structural issues, such as complex teaching administration, lack of transparency, lack of teaching incentives, and lack of growth mindset.

As a solution, MoECRT championed “Emancipated Learning” (“Merdeka Belajar”) educational reform as a key transformation theme. The reform is set to unbundle the meaning of education to its truest value proposition – it is intended to improve Indonesian students’ learning outcomes, promote quality and equitable education by creating changes in the learning paradigm and practices, empowering educators and school/university leaders, as well as encouraging active engagement of the education ecosystem. A key example includes the introduction of the Emancipated Learning curriculum for K12 students, where a holistic, flexible curriculum approach is encouraged to support students’ core numeracy and literacy competencies as well as character development based on students’ interests and talents. Hence, the Emancipated Learning curriculum was intended to replace the previous, more rigid, standardized curriculum.

To scale the reform even further, an end-to-end technological ecosystem & exposure then became one of the Ministry’s pivotal implementation and scale strategies. To fully serve the purpose, MoECRT partnered with GovTech Edu, a dedicated tech, product, policy & operations team with collective experiences in building and scaling nationwide digital products.

GovTech Edu works as the thought and development partner to the Directorate Generals in the Ministry, bringing holistic technology product experience and resources. The Ministry officials act as the primary vision owner – bringing problem statements observed in Indonesia’s education system – in which GovTech Edu will then be responsible for clarifying and defining the appropriate technological interventions to enable the desired transformation. GovTech Edu’s principle in working with the MoECRT is based on collaboration. This means that the team is not a ‘tech feature factory’ and therefore has the freedom to determine the appropriate tech solutions for any outlined problems.

The partnership has been proven successful in delivering tangible solutions at scale. As a result, the Indonesia MoECRT launched key innovative digital products as per 2022:

Emancipated Teaching Platform (“Platform Merdeka Mengajar”) is a web-app platform enabling teachers to upskill themselves, get context-specific teaching materials, and share best practices. The platform provides practical guidance and content for teachers to plan for differentiated classroom learning modules, implement the newly introduced national Emancipated Curriculum, gain quality teaching materials, share best practices, and find inspiration from local teacher communities.
The Education Scorecard (“Rapor Pendidikan'') platform was introduced to provide local government officials, school principals, and teachers with an action-oriented report on their respective schools’ literacy, numeracy, and school environment data. The data points are based on National Assessment results and are designed to encourage school officials to make evidence-based decisions when planning for their schools’ quality improvement.
Two integrated, easy, and accountable school financial management systems (“ARKAS” and “SIPLah”) were launched to support schools’ budget planning, funds disbursement, and procurement process. “ARKAS” platform aims to reduce administrative work through accountable, transparent school financial and problem-solving management, starting from the planning, organizing, and reporting processes. Meanwhile, “SIPLah” is the designated official e-commerce platform for schools’ procurement with pre-qualified suppliers.
Emancipated Campus (“Kampus Merdeka”) platform is a matchmaking platform between universities, students, & industry practitioners – it aims to provide university students with out-of-campus experiences such as internships, research opportunities, & other practical activities.

All of the above platforms are made accessible for free through a single sign-on account called “belajar.id”, allowing teachers, school administrators, local governments & students to benefit from the rolled-out digital products. In the future, these innovations are envisioned to reach a level of irreversibility. They will impact the mass market and instill a solid habit-making behavior, perspective, and mindset for targeted users. The mission is to empower various users in the education sector to collectively increase student learning outcomes across the nation by leveraging the power of technology & public service reforms.

Innovation Description

What Makes Your Project Innovative?

The MoECRT collaboration with GovTech Edu is one of Indonesia's first public-tech sector partnerships. It focuses on delivering tech solutions by co-designing them with teachers, schools principals, local governments and university students, supported with apt user insights. Users’ involvement is ensured through a robust immersion and research process. The close collaboration with the Ministry’s stakeholders has enabled a first-of-its-kind and innovative way of working, where the conventional top-down government direction is decoupled through a bottom-up, data-backed, and user-centric approach.

GovTech Edu is heavily equipped with a world-class tech stack. On the back end, data reliability and security are safeguarded. As a result, we launched multiple breakthrough products at scale within 1.5 years, with a total of over 2 million users. The collaboration allows grassroots reform, ensuring the sustainability of the innovations instead of relying only on a top-down policy strategy.

What is the current status of your innovation?

We are continuously developing, improving, and scaling our products. In 2021, we released a Single Sign-On account that provides access to various education platforms for students, teachers & school administrators. To date, over 9 million accounts have been activated. In the same year, we launched the University Internship Matchmaking Platform, reaching over 700K registered students & over 2.5K participating companies.

In 2022, we introduced the Emancipated Teaching Platform (Teacher SuperApp) and Education Scorecard. After only 7 months of release, the Teacher SuperApp reached over 2.3 million downloads and over 1.6 million users. Today, we are adding more curated, practical content and enriching best practices shared by teacher communities. Over 140K schools have used the Education Scorecard. We are adding targeted recommendation features designed to help school principals make use of key data points in order to plan effectively to eventually increase their school’s quality.

Innovation Development

Collaborations & Partnerships

All products are the result of close collaboration between MoECRT and GovTech Edu. We involve our users in our products’ co-design process to build a strong user-centricity and sensibility. We gather inputs from school principals, teachers, local government offices, university students and lecturers, as well as industry partners. To a limited extent, we also partner with edutech firms (as content contributors) and other ministries (such as the Ministry of Finance) on several key initiatives.

Users, Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

The Teacher SuperApp allows teachers to benefit through quality upskilling content, context-specific teaching materials, and best practices. The Education Scorecard enables school principals to easily access National Assessment data and recommendations on improving school quality. Through ARKAS, school principals use financial management tools for transparent planning and reporting. College students benefit from out-of-campus internships & research opportunities through the matchmaking platform.

Innovation Reflections

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

Teachers, the front-liners of the education system, have been heavily impacted by our products. As of September 2022, the Teacher SuperApp has reached 2+ million downloads, with 4.8 rating on Google Play Store. A total of more than 3,500 learning communities have contributed to the app, and more than 92K upskilling and inspirational content were included. It has been used by more than 1.6 million teachers nationwide and has become one of Indonesia's top 5 education apps.

Moreover, school principals, as the embodiment of school leadership, have also benefited. More than 200K schools have utilized the school financial management tool & a total of more than US$3BN funds were managed through the tool. Over 140K schools have used the Education Scorecard.

Finally, our university internship matchmaking platform has also been accessed by more than 700K university students, of which approximately ~25% have been matched with industry & company participants.

Challenges and Failures

Solving foundational education problems is a marathon needing grit, perseverance, and collective efforts. While technology serves as the enabler, technology alone will not move the needle if it is not supported by the right infrastructure, policies, behavior, and mindset change from education participants.

Instilling a growth mindset and changing users’ behavior remains a key challenge. Mental blocks exist in pockets of user segmentation, whereby the status quo is still the preferred way. Furthermore, structural issues such as the lack of teachers' financial incentives remain a challenge that would need to be addressed by the government and policymakers.

Tech readiness is a challenge, especially as rural areas in Indonesia do not yet have a strong infrastructure for users to use digital products. Tight collaboration between private and public players is needed to ensure equal and dispersed high-quality access to digital infrastructure. However, we have yet to achieve such a goal.

Conditions for Success

Firstly, solid governance, principles, and trust between the MoECRT and GovTech Edu would be critical in ensuring a sustainable long-term collaboration, which in turn would result in the success of policy transformation that goes hand in hand with the technology ecosystem enablement. The leadership of both parties would need to be constantly aligned with the reform’s vision and mission while fostering an empowering culture and environment for talents to produce optimally.

Secondly, strong interconnectedness and ecosystem thinking are necessary. A team must not work in a silo. Any tech innovation that is delivered has to be equipped with the right support from policies, infrastructure & system reinforcement, on-the-ground operations strategy, and engineering resources. Key initiatives have to involve both parties.

Finally, a strong sense of urgency and focus on priorities must be embedded by sequentially identifying key critical problems and working backward from the vision.

Replication

We strongly believe that fast breakthrough movements require skin in the game for both public and private players to succeed in their innovation initiatives.

Two replication events are possible. Firstly, a similar collaboration model may be replicated in another Ministry or public institution that wishes to utilize tech to accelerate innovation and transformation. Institutionalizing the replication can be done through centralized recommendation and financial support from the government (for example, the nation’s legislative office) as well as open opportunities to tap into other sectors besides education. We envision the “GovTech” concept to scale even larger nationwide, solving grassroots systemic issues in varied sectors.

Secondly, we believe these product innovations have a tremendous potential to be replicated in other nations as well. Imagine a world where a teacher in Indonesia can use our Teacher SuperApp to share experiences with a teacher in Finland.

Lessons Learned

GovTech Edu comprises mostly private sector talents, many of whom have not previously worked with the government. Open-mindedness and empathy should be part of the partnership’s culture and working methods. The MoECRT stakeholders and GovTech Edu talents should see eye-to-eye and align on each party’s role in executing the transformation.

A strong user-centric mindset and sensibility are essential in building technology products serving the public. Since the commercial aspect is out of the picture, it is inherently more challenging yet more important for innovation builders to understand what the users need versus only achieving key metric targets.

Effective resource allocation and operationally scrappy are crucial to ensure we maintain high-quality technology while simultaneously reaching a mass market tipping point of irreversibility. This should be achieved through end-to-end support from policy transformation to adoption strategy and community activation.

Anything Else?

The below list of sites/links is a list of digital products we have launched as of September 2022. However, the sites are not accessible to the public – they can only be accessed through “belajar.id” single sign-on account provided to users.

https://guru.kemdikbud.go.id/
https://raporpendidikan.kemdikbud.go.id/app
https://kampusmerdeka.kemdikbud.go.id/
https://arkas.kemdikbud.go.id/
https://siplah.kemdikbud.go.id/
https://belajar.id/