UNS – The Vocational School (SV) Universitas Sebelas Maret (UNS) Surakarta held a Vocational Coaching Corner entitled ‘Exist during COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis’, Monday (11/5/2020). Attended by participants from various universities such as Universitas Telkom, Universitas Negeri Surabaya (Unesa), and Universitas Halu Oleo, SV UNS invited two speakers; Santoso Tri Hananto, M. Acc., the Director of SV UNS and Abdul Azis, M. Cs, Deputy Director of SV UNS for General Affairs and Finance.
As the first speaker, Santoso delivered his speech on ‘Maintaining Human Resource Quality During and Post COVID-19 Pandemic’. Opening his speech, Santoso conveyed that there are challenges and obstacles faced by vocational education at the higher education, especially at SV UNS, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“During the pandemic in 2020, online lectures are less effective for theoretical courses. Practical courses at the campus also experienced obstacles. And industrial intern did not go according to plan,” Santoso stated.
Considering the impact of COVID-19 pandemic, Santoso stated that SV UNS has prepared a series of efforts if COVID-19 pandemic will continue to a longer time.
“The alternative of solution for vocational higher education in the second semester of 2020 is preparing policy, regulation, guideline, and standard operational procedure (PRGS) of curriculum implementation during the crisis, especially the adjustment of learning outcome,” he continued.
SV UNS also prepared another option of lecture method by realizing industrial level competence laboratory based on Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (AR/ VR) and designing an application for practical courses based on AR/VR.
Aside from vocational education, Santoso also mentioned that COVID-19 also affects UNS partners, including firms and MSME.
In front of webinar participant, Santoso provided five alternatives of solution for MSME in facing the pandemic. The alternatives are managing cash flow to secure working capital, switch business/product, halt the operation, for the time being, self-evaluation to prepare for an efficient business process supported by the information technology and appropriate technology, and designing intern program in partnership with vocational higher education.
At the second session of the Vocational Coaching Corner, Abdul Azis delivered his speech entitled ‘Coding Skill: Provision to Rising from Crisis’. Opening his speech, Abdul Azis explained that coding is an activity to coding is the activity of compiling instructions/program code to the computer so that the device does what the programmer wants.
Although so far people have assumed that coding is a difficult activity, Abdul Azis mentioned that coding has several benefits.
“We can learn a problem-solving skill, in which we can solve a problem. By learning to code, we can produce a digital product, thus we are not limiting ourselves as a user of the existing digital product,” Abdul Azis explained.
In his speech, Abdul Azis also mentioned the importance of curriculum on Computational Thinking which was once proposed by the Minister of Education and Culture (Mendikbud) Nadiem Makarim. For him, learning is not limited to writing, reading, and calculating. Computational Thinking is also considered as a basic skill that has to be mastered by people in this 21st century.
“Computational Thinking is already used in Australia, China, New Zealand, and has been planned by the UK since 2012. There are several parts of Computational Thinking, such as decomposing, abstraction, pattern recognition, and algorithm,” Abdul Azis concluded. Humas UNS/Yefta