H. E. Nadiem Anwar Makarim, Indonesia’s Minister of Education and Culture

One-On-One with Sachin Gopalan, Co-Founder & CEO, Orbit Future Academy

Indonesia’s education system has received a bolt of change under Minister Nadiem Makarim. The former tech entrepreneur has introduced fresh thinking in how the nation can produce graduates that are suited to fill the jobs of the future. Minister Makarim is a strong advocate for introducing the language of technology into schools; of fostering collaboration between education and other economic sectors; of creating a new learning environment that encourages creative thinking and friction; of new methods of teaching.

The minister was full of praise by the initiative between his ministry and Intel Corp to launch the AI for Youth program for Indonesia which he noted was a microcosm or role model of collaboration between government, private and non-profit sectors.

“It’s the perfect example for how we can collaborate on key aspects of the “freedom to learn” initiative; of improving the quality of our human resources, which is the key objective for our educational institutions. This will not happen without influence from other sectors.”

He added that the AI for Youth program has many touch points such as creating scale for innovation; teacher training; future skills; entrepreneurship & startup skills; class room technologies and most importantly the program focuses on technology production rather than just mere consumption of technology.

“We need to make it clear that consuming technology and producing technology are two different things. Computational logic is different with AI or machine learning while digital entrepreneurship and coding are skills that we need to digest one by one. Many people have a misperception on these core skills and combine them as Industry 4.0 skills,” he said.

“What I like best Intel’s AI for Youth program is that it touches so many aspects: increasing human resources for consuming digital toolkits to improve their skills, training teachers to be able to teach foundational computational logic that in the end will lead to students to become coders, data analysts or machine learning engineers.”

Minister Makarim added: “So I think this program is the kind of program that will we always support and we hope in 2021 with the support from the President who has prioritized digital talent, we will be able to accelerate it in extreme ways because honestly in Indonesia, our manufacturing sector and our industry will take a long time to achieve the level of development similar to what other countries have done. Historically, if we just follow the path from industrialized countries, it will be very difficult for us to catch them. So honestly the only way we can catch up is by leapfrogging and the only way to that is by leveraging technology.”

He noted that Indonesia must focus on developing software skills that are the basis of most technologies. In the modern economy, every sector depends on software solutions, be it manufacturing or robotics. To raise and improve productivity, Indonesia must produce digital talent that can create new software based on AI, machine learning and data analytics. In essence the country must move from just consuming technology to producing technology.

“There are five groups of digital talent: software programmer, engineer, designer, researcher and data analyst which are the core to developing digital products. And they all need slightly different skills set. The government will make sure that at least in university and senior high schools, computational logic becomes a priority. But if we wait for universities to develop a digital curriculum, it will take another 20-30 years,” he noted.

That is why under Kampus Merdeka (Freedom Campus) the minister wants to bring practitioners from other industry sectors to teach in universities or to send students and lecturers to study technology in the real world. It’s much faster and more convenient. “That is our budget and policy strategy, to send out as many students as possible outside campus to gain an education in technology application and to bring as many practitioners to teach on campus and thirdly, we want lecturers to train themselves in technology and the outside world. The idea is true immersion between industry and academia in designing new subjects that are focused on technology.”

Minister Makarim participated in a wide-ranging question and answer session moderated by Sachin Gopalan, co-founder of Orbit Future Academy. 

Q1:  You have worked with millennials both in your previous job as well as in your current position as minister. What is their aspiration? What are the main challenges they face when in the working environment?

NM: When I was in the technology industry, and even in the ministry I have many youngsters working with me. I have created hybrid teams made up of both millennials and seniors as they can collaborate as one team. From what I’ve learned and observed being working with youngsters is firstly our higher education system isn’t very ideal. The best quality graduates, when they enter workforce, they are shocked. What is this thing called meetings? What is a collaboration platform? Oh we now should be more problem focused and metric focused, what is that all about? How do I adapt? Many of the graduates are overwhelmed by real world requirements especially in technology sector which is super fast paced and very demanding.

I started to get signals that something was wrong with our university education which produces graduates who are smart but does not simulate real world working conditions. There is no simulation during fours years of study. Almost every company that hires fresh graduates has to train them first or prefers graduates who have received training elsewhere.

The other process is to hire fresh graduates but put them through induction programs for one to two years, especially multinational companies. They collect the best graduates and then train them on management training etc. That inspired me to think that it might be better to ask graduates what percentage of their degrees was actually relevant to their current jobs? Sadly that statistic never passed beyond 15% and that is staggering fact which forced me into thinking that we must do something different.

We need to increase the relevancy to between 40% to 50%. And not only relevancy but also engagement is important. In my companies, the talented graduates that performed well were those that had leadership experience during their university studies. Activities that need collaboration, problem solving with other team members became the base for their competence once they embraced the working world.

The concept of collaboration, team based and project based leaning is what inspired me to create change through Kampus Merdeka. When I asked students, who are mostly still very young and not all of them have clear aspiration, what is their main challenge, most of them said they were confused and wondered why the adaptation process was so hard. Many said they wished that what they had studied in university was closer to what they were doing in their jobs.

That is their aspiration and I hope to deliver beginning of that process during my time as Minister of Education and Culture.

Q2: What is the role of future skills in the workforce since there will be much more disruption and redefinition of jobs in the future?

NM: Fundamentally, if I have to rank the core skills to be able to become productive in the digital economy and to leapfrog Indonesia into the future, it will be firstly, the ability to learn. It’s strange that we teach so much knowledge to our children but we never teach them how to learn. Its could be just one science itself on how to learn; how to receive information effectively; how to seek information from others that have more knowledge than us; how to learn from our environment such us doing research, searching on Google or YouTube; reading books and talking to experts – this are the most important things.

Step zero before gaining the ability to learn is having the willingness to learn. The ability to learn is a skill by itself. We must instill in our students the ability to improve themselves. Third is collaboration, the ability to work in a team. Here we have empathy element and other elements such as communication. When I refer to communication I do not mean just talking to others but writing in understandable and proper grammar; collaborating effectively through emails; presenting power point presentations – how we move and convince people. By this I am referring to pragmatic communication.

The other important thing is being independent, not just learning about independence but also having the independence to motivate ourselves to take on problems and having the willingness to try and solve those problems.   

And the last important thing is of course creativity; the ability to a see problem from many angles; the ability to test out solutions. This is what I call scientific creativity; so we try to walk the in a different direction but arriving in the same place. Creativity is a source of innovation. These are important skill sets to embrace digital era. Note I did not say excel, algebra, coding etc. because these skills that I mention are more important than the actual content. Once they able to receive information effectively, willing to learn new things, they will consume whatever content that is given to them.

OK today we will learn machine learning one on one, or android engineering, or how to use any data platform like SQL. So the key is on the soft skill, profile and mindset, and the next step we can just roll them into the domain ie technology.

Q3. What do you think of the infrastructure challenge such as connectivity, trainers and teachers, curriculum? What are the steps we need to take to succeed in this journey?

NM: First, I want to address one misconception that you need technology to teach computational logic. This is not true. Critical thinking and problem solving can be taught by many creative ways. The essential thing is who is the person in front of the students especially if it’s a teacher, a parent or a mentor.

If the daily learning activity is full of three things: a lot of questions; a lot of trying; and lots of creativity, it will automatically lead to problem solving and computational logic. There is one professor form ITB, Ibu Inge, who developed many programming games, toys using flash cards and que cards to teach secondary and high school students. Ofcourse there are also many digital tools also such as mind-craft and software coding tools but they are not the only options. The most important is for the teacher to adopt critical thinking and preferring collaborative and participatory learning methods to be successful. Ultimately it’s the quality of our human resources.

Technology however can play bigger role to help guide the teacher in order to be able bring together modules and elements that specifically shape computational logic. But one fact is clear; from the curriculum point of view what we call mathematics today is in need of evolution. The math concept that we have now needs to gradually shift into computational logic to establish systems that are more aligned engineering, not only to engineering software but “Engineering” that builds something with logic and numerical principals. We should not just learn things but we must also create things.

This is the key for our preparation towards Industry 4.0 and developing digital talent. If our kids are used to designing and building things, it will have a significant impact. I Imagine in four years there will be schools like maker schools where students can freely build things. This is the direction I would like our education system to move towards but of course it cannot be done overnight. But that is our dream.

Q4. We are starting to hear a lot about algorithmic thinking.  Is this a concept that we need to prepare now?

NM: I am sorry if there might some misinterpretation from me on algorithmic thinking so please correct me if I am wrong. In my view, this is the sequence of what needs to be learned

First, the basic fundamental always is computational logic. Secondly, we need critical thinking; and thirdly algorithmic thinking. I think the algorithmic thinking is just a further concept of quantitative abstraction. And coding for machine learning is nothing more than abstraction of formula to solve problem in real world.

Q5. How we can train our teachers and improve teacher training given that we have 5 million teachers in the country? Is there a roadmap?

Every time we want to solve a problem, we need to have a hypothesis. Our hypothesis on traditional ways to teach teachers, which is gathering them in one room and giving them a power point presentation and expecting them to walk out and become better teachers is wrong.

We know what not to do.  Seminar systems won’t be effective over the long run. The best way is to create simulation schools with real students. These schools will teach other teachers are called sekolah penggerak. It is not the same with sekolah unggul konsep, or sekolah rujukan nothing related with quality of the students.

Sekolah Penggerak are schools where teachers and principals that have the ability and motivation to coach their fellow educators will conduct classes. I am using the method where one learns from experts whether it’s in coding or tennis. When we play tennis and want to improve, the only way to upgrade is to play with better players. We cannot improve if we only play at the same level. Teachers also need to observe and be observed by their peers who are deemed to be better. So we need to shift the paradigm where training is conducted in schools an classrooms instead of seminar rooms.

The second point is that we need a structural change to searching for leaders in education. In the future, we expect all principals to be selected through sekolah penggerak with the criteria that principals should have the ability to coach and motivate teachers so we can improve the overall teaching standards.

Thirdly, we want to develop a new generation of teachers who have passed through more rigorous selection criteria. When they enter the system, they can become agents of change as it is easier for younger teachers to become such change agents.

Q6. Indonesia has a rich and broad culture given its ethnic and religious diversity. What in your view is the correlation between education and culture and how does that impact teaching and learning?

 NM: There are two definitions of culture. First culture relates to our heritage such as artifacts, dance music and other elements. Secondly, culture can be defined somewhat differently to identify our social norms, our social values and how we interact with one another.  All economic sectors such as education, industry, healthcare can exist independently but they exist within our common culture. We must have the freedom within our culture to experiment and draw the best practices from each sector.

So in education, teachers must have the freedom to adapt the curriculum to local needs. They should be able to engage with other sectors so as to create collaboration and bring new ideas into the classroom. This culture will not be effective if there is no engagement between education and other economic sectors. We want to give teachers the freedom to select from a menu rather than force them to adopt a fixed curriculum like a factory that produces standard robots. We need to develop customized learning if we want to develop a knowledge-based economy and for this we need to give teachers greater freedom to set the curriculum.

In closing, I would once again like to thank Intel for including Indonesia in this program. This is only the beginning of a journey and I hope we will have hundreds of such programs in the future so the government can scale up in a meaningful manner. The challenge for Indonesia is that everything we do must be scalable for it to impactful and meaningful. And so the big challenge we face in the ministry and the education sector is how do we scale centers of excellence or training methods in ways that does not dilute quality. This is a challenge we can solve together but it will require creative thinking so that we can take AI for Youth program in partnership with Intel to as many Indonesian students as possible.

My personal target is to produce 100,000 digital talents each year who will be creators or producers of technology. This number cannot be achieved by the government alone as we need the participation of the private sector to scale up.