Universitas Terbuka Indonesia Open Policy 319As part of the national mission to ascertain access to higher
education, UT reaches students with financial burden who are living in
very remote areas. Through special scholarship program UT provides
free tuition and living expenses to enable those potential students fulfil
their dream to attain higher education degree. This program has
successfully implemented for about five years and the success of rate of
those students are remarkably high (UT 2014). This has proven that
UT’s Open and Inclusive Policy enables to democratize higher
education and in the future is expected to eradicate inequality and
injustice and ensure the increased prosperity and welfare for the
disadvantage community living in remote area of Indonesia.
18.4 Eradicating the Knowledge Divide
UT’s open content policy serves an important role for the success of
Open Educational Resources (OER) implementation in Indonesia. As
having the importance of OER to reduce knowledge and educational
resource divide among educational institutions, UT developed learning
materials to be open to public (Daryono and Belawati, 2010). Since the
beginning, UT’s learning materials have been widely used by students
and lecturer from other universities. The limited availability of quality
learning materials in many parts of Indonesia in particular out of Java
Island has made them to use UT printed learning materials which are
written by nation-wide scale experts. Based on the printed learning
materials UT develops multimedia learning materials including video
lecture, audio broadcast, web based learning supplement, and dry
laboratory (virtual laboratory). The UT’s owned learning materials are
now declared to public and adopt Creative Common License to enable
re-use and repurpose them.
Considering the needs of teachers across Indonesia in particular out
of Java Island to quality learning materials, UT developed online teacher