UNAIR NEWS – As a barometer for the university reputation in the international arena, Quacquarelli Symonds World University Ranking (QS WUR) applies various assessment indicators. One of them is the Outbound Staff field which is currently being encouraged by Universitas Airlangga.
Staff Outbound Indicator is an assessment on staff and lecturers’ achievements in making official trips abroad. It is applied to universities at Asian level, with the aim to obtain academic peer list which supports forty percent. Through these indicators, UNAIR not only has the opportunity to establish connections, but also participate in world academic events.
However, there are constraints in achieving the expected indicator. Various problems such as the mechanism of permission submission to visit abroad until manual data collection is less effective and they hamper the Staff Outbound programs.
“All this time, the submission process until data recording from lecturers going overseas is done manually, with paper. There is no application that can input Staff Outbound data in real time, “explained Yessinda Oktaria who was a staff of UNAIR Planning and Development Board (BPP) on Monday, April 15, 2019.
According to her observations, the manual procedures are quite time-consuming. Not to mention when the staff do not carry out the requirement needed. For example, related to the sudden application of official permits abroad.
“Sometimes the permit application has not reached the highest bureaucracy at the university level yet, but the lecturer has left. So, the submission period is short. When at least one-month period needed, “added the alumnus of UNAIR Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB).
Starting from those problems, an idea came up to create a web-based application to facilitate data collection and filing services. The innovation named Staff Outbound App was the work of Yessinda and her two colleagues, Abdur Rahman Sadad and Rachmad Eko Hariono.
“At that time there was Airlangga Innovation competition held by UNAIR Human Resources Directorate. There were a lot of participants. One team consists of three people with members from one unit or different units. I collaborated with Mas Rahman as Team leader and Mas Eko, both from Directorate of Finance, ” she recalled.
For three months, the three collaborated to make an application which then named runner-up. Interestingly, Staff Outbound App do not only facilitate lecturers, but related units in UNAIR regarding overseas official trips such as HR, University Secretariat, and Airlangga Global Engagement (AGE).
Rahman as the team leader said that over time the features in the application will be updated regularly according to the needs of the verifiers, such as HR, University Secretariat and AGE.
“The most challenging is when we develop a group feature as the submission of this Staff Outbound should be done individually. However, there are times when some lecturers or staff have difficulty in inputting data. Finally, this feature was made to facilitate the submission collectively with the help of faculty officers, “explained Rahman.
The next challenge is the launching preparation and dissemination to staff who do not understand a web-based system. Even so, the three hoped that the innovation can be useful and spread to student exchange as well. (*)
Author: Nabila Amelia
Editor: Feri Fenoria Rifa’i
