The launch of Students Build Villages by Universitas Brawijaya, has made a real contribution to rural communities who still need assistance to continue to improve their standard of living from various sides such as education, religiosity, character, agriculture, animal husbandry, environmental preservation and the economy. One of them, by improving the quality of education.
This is what the 1000 village strategic community service grant team does. The team chaired by Khalid Rahman, S.Pd.I., M.Pd.I. This program implements a program to improve the quality of education through literacy and digitalization of learning resources, based on the Independent Curriculum.
This team consists of Dr. George Towar Ikbal Tawakkal, M.Sc., Albar Adetary Hasibuan, M.Phil., and Ahmad Zaki Fadlur Rohman, S.IP., M.A. held this digitization at SDN Tenggerwetan 1 No. 453.
One of the obstacles in improving the quality of education in this village, according to Albar, is the lack of cellular signal. “The majority of the people of Tenggerwetan village get cellular signals only by relying on the wifi network which is traded in the form of vouchers by local businessmen whose signal is limited,” he explained.
Based on the problem, UB lecturer team offers to increase bandwidth for schools. “This attempt has been made before, but does not give any result. So now what can be done is to add routers at schools so that the wifi signal can be reached more widely,” he said.
Moreover, he added, the team of service lecturers will also send letters to providers to respond to community and teacher concerns regarding cellular signals, especially to improve the quality of digital and internet-based education.
The teaching staff at this school, according to the team’s observations, have creative potential, one of which is through the official tenggersatu.id school website. However, Albar assessed that infrastructure support must continue to be improved. “We brought in a national-level Independent Curriculum Trainer, namely Galih Puji Mulyoto, M.Pd. and PPG Tutors (Teacher Professional Education) to assist in making teaching modules and project modules, which of course begins with the preparation of learning outcomes, learning objectives and the flow of learning objectives to design lessons and lesson schedules,” he explained.
This curriculum, explained Galih, is to boost the quality of education after facing the Covid-19 Pandemic crisis, the threat of negative content in the digital world, financial pressure on educational institutions, digital access in all industries and skills renewal in the digital world that requires cyber security. “The independent curriculum makes students ready to face the challenges of their time while still inheriting the values and culture of the Indonesian nation’s character, so that they are ready to play their role in their era while remaining religious and rahmatan lil ‘alamain,” he explained.
From this assistance, it is hoped that there will be an increase in access to learning resources and information in independent curriculum-based schools. “We also hope that there will be ongoing cooperation in this village, outside of education,” he concluded. [Humas UB/ Trans. Iir]