| Abstract: | Providing learning support for students has been the most challenging issue for Universitas Terbuka (UT) in Indonesia since most students live in rural areas within which qualified tutors are hard to find. Attending face‐to‐face meetings within regular scheduled times is not feasible for most working students. Similarly, disseminating academic administration and information on time has also been very difficult to do since students are scattered throughout the country. These unresolved problems are believed to have resulted in low course completion. The recent development of ICT as well as its infrastructure in Indonesia has opened up a possibility for UT to provide its students with a fast, reliable and affordable two‐way communication channel. In accordance with this, UT piloted the use of ICT (specifically the Internet) to provide online tutorials to its students. It was expected that students taking advantage of the online tutorials would contribute to higher completion rates and achievement than those who did not. The project was carried out with the aid of a grant from the International Development and Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada. This paper reports the findings of that pilot project, which show that student participation in online tutorials does indeed improve course completion rates and achievement. |
