Universitas Terbuka (UT) an open and distant higher education institution of Indonesia conducts the in-service
teacher education program. In order to complete the program, the students – mostly teachers - have to submit
the final academic paper. In fact, most of the UT students have difficulty to write this academic paper. UT offers
an academic writing course to solve this writing program. Most of the student view academic writing still as a
difficult assignment. Most of the students view academic writing as a difficult assignment to complete. UT has to
find an appropriate instructional strategy that can facilitate student to write the academic writing assignment.
One of the instructional strategy that can be selected to solve the academic writing problems is concept
mapping. The aim of this study is to elaborate the implementation of concept map as an instructional strategy to
facilitate the open and distance learning students io complete academic writing assignments. A design based
research was applied to measure the effectiveness of using concept mapping strategy in helping students to gain
academic writing skills. The steps of research and development model from Borg, Gall and Gall which consist
of instructional design and development phases were implemented in this study. The result of this study
indicated that students were facilitated and enjoyed the process of academic writing used the concept map
strategy.