Support Services through @UT_Makassar: A Case in Indonesia

Jiwapraja, Sugilar and Sylvana, Andi and Maryati, Jalil (2013) Support Services through @UT_Makassar: A Case in Indonesia. In: Konferensi ICDE, 15-19 Oktober 2013, Tianjin, China.

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Abstract

Indonesia is an archipelago that consists of more than 17,000 islands. Universitas Terbuka (UT) offers educational programs through open and distance learning mode to serve people who cannot be reached by conventional higher education. To serve educational access for people in all over Indonesia area, UT opens regional offices in the area that need it. UPBJJ-UT Makassar is a regional office of UT in Makassar, covering South Sulawesi areas. UPBJJ-UT Makassar has approximately 20,000 students. To communicate with students and provide support services, UPBJJ-UT Makassar tries to introduce a social network media, i.e. twitter services @UT_Makassar. Despite being developed less than one year ago, the twitter service @UT_Makassar has ranked 40th on http://twitaholic.com (by followers in 'Makassar, South Sulawesi'). Until June 4th 2013, there were 1,453 tweets and 300 followers of @UT_Makassar. The objectives of this report are (1) to describe the message content of @UT_Makassar, (2) to analyze student's responses to @UT_Makassar, and (3) to examine the effectiveness @UT_Makassar in increasing the student's intention to re-enroll. A content analysis method was employed to a random sample of 125 messages to reveal message substance from @UT_Makassar. The survey method was used to gain data for describing student responses to @UT_Makassar. Meanwhile, comparison of two groups of students who follow and who don’t was used to test the effectiveness of @UT_Makassar for improving student's intention of re-enrollment. The research results show that the tweets of @UT_Makassar contain of reply tweets to students’ asking (29.72%), news about UT occasions (22.19%), series of tweets about certain issues, such as describing how to study in ODL environment (15.17%), retweets messages relevant to the students, for instance an information from Directorate Higher Education concerning scholarship (9.62%), greetings (8,75%), information from UT (8.38%), and link to a web sources (6.13%). Most of students (84,4%) following @UT_Makassar was new users of twitter and @UT_Makassar stimulates them to have twitter account and then to communicate with each others. All students in the sample considered that @UT_Makassar were useful for them. However there were no evidences that following @UT_Makassar meant that the intention to re-enroll was high. It is recommended for further researches for taking account of a treatment that enable students to access @UT_Makassar intensively so that the effects toward students’ intention to re-enrollment can be confirmed.

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