The need for technological disruption in Indonesia’s education system continues to be apparent. However, this is easier said than done with many challenges facing those who are trying.
To better understand the landscape and also shine a light on some of the bright spots within Indonesia’s edtech scene, we spoke to Adi Halim from Eduku. Having been inspired by the simplicity and potential for using a learning management system during his undergrad degree in the US, Adi set out to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the Indonesian education system by starting Eduku and working with governmental bodies and public schools across the region.
To date, there are more than hundreds of thousands of students and over ten thousand teachers benefitting from the use of Eduku in their classrooms.
Andre Benito from LingoTalk answers the Five Questions to introduce his company to the region
Eduku provides Indonesia’s K12 schools with a school management system to replace the outdated process currently in place. This is usually a manual process using pen and paper, which needs an upgrade to implement digital platforms to improve the learning and teaching process.
In this interview, Adi shares how the company started and his plans for the business in the coming years. Fluent in three languages – Bahasa Indonesia, English and Japanese – Adi also used to be a hardcore gamer.
If you can’t find Adi in his office working on Eduku, he might be reading a book or playing some games to pass the time.
Sell us your company/service in 300 words?
Eduku provides Indonesia’s K12 schools with a school management system to revolutionise the outdated process, which had relied heavily on the usage of pen and paper to implement digital platforms to improve the learning and teaching process.
We started Eduku because we are aware that there are issues in terms of the proper monitoring of students’ performances and the inefficient use of teachers’ time, given that they have heavy administrative tasks to handle on top of their responsibilities of educating their students and caring for their well-being.
Currently, school operators take about 2 weeks to compile all the data required to create an end-of-semester report, and Eduku has been able to shorten this process to a mere 5 minutes with seamless integration within the platform. With the creation of our school performance dashboard, we can enable stakeholders like teachers and department heads to be able to monitor the real-time performance of students and other forms of data within the educational institution, reducing the time needed to bring in external auditors in order for them to be able to check through the school data.
This service is a way to reimagine the tracking of a student’s progress in Indonesia, as it will also aid them in providing a lens on their performance in school to themselves, their parents, the school and authorities, making it a platform relevant to everyone.
What is stopping you from having the largest company in the world?
At the moment, we are presently prioritising Indonesian schools in the Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, outside of Java, where they need our solution the most. Later down the road, we intend to do a market expansion into our neighbouring countries in Southeast Asia to compete with the global giants.
As a country with over 400 thousand schools within the country, Indonesia is one of the countries with the most complex education system because of its curriculum; we cater to our own curriculum, unlike other countries which adopt a majorly-used curriculum in the world, allowing us to provide the most localised service for the educators and students on our platform.
If you could change one thing about the tech industry in Southeast Asia, what would it be?
I would not change a thing about the tech industry in Southeast Asia, because it is through the current status of the industry that has allowed us to dive into our project of this learning management system.
However, what we would hope for is to see the improvement of the technological infrastructure across Southeast Asia so that people would be more easily adapt to utilising technology. Countries like Indonesia and the Philippines, for instance, still have a lot of blindspots in terms of network and electricity, and this remains a big issue for the citizens in the country, as they are not able to properly utilise technology to the maximum potential. In time, I would hope that as the technological infrastructure improves, we’d be able to see more creative, innovative and easily adaptable uses of technology that better the lives of others.
Name one person in the region, who is making a difference in technology?
They are many big techs and unicorns in the region – like Grab, GOTO, and Shopee – that has definitely been making a difference in technology, but if I were to pinpoint one particular organisation, it would be GOTO.
Being primarily based in Indonesia, GOTO’s impact has paved the way for people to embrace the adoption of technology in their daily lives such as increased use of mobile applications and even the older generation warming up to technology for various reasons and purposes. With more and more people open to adopting technology for various use cases, it has made it easier for the previously very traditional education bodies to consider the use of technology in their institutions.
What would you want people to remember you for, 100 years from now?
I want people to remember me for how we have been able to influence the education system with the technology that we have provided them with.
Education is one of the most important pillars of a nation, and without proper education of our younger generation, our country will not be able to progress as far as we would like it to. It is through our plans and actions of building and developing this learning management system that we want to contribute and be part of improving the education system for not only the students, but for the educators and even the country, by simply digitizing administrative tasks and the performance datas of students so that our stakeholders would be able to learn and teach effectively.
We do aim to become the most affordable, and yet most complete learning management system, in order to provide customer success to each of the regions and schools within Indonesia. It is also through our goals that we do hope that through the usage of our system, big data analytics would be able to help regional governments to accurately pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of the education system, thus being able to alter and recreate a viable curriculum to slowly but surely, improve the education quality in Indonesia.