Around 24% of the Indonesian population comprises the younger generation*, each with their own interests, style of learning, and uniqueness. Bina Nusantara University (BINUS UNIVERSITY) believes that to help youth – six million of whom are university students** – reach their utmost potential, student-centered learning has to become a priority. This is why BINUS UNIVERSITY developed BINUSMAYA 7.0 – a learning management system (LMS) running on Microsoft Azure that allows every BINUS UNIVERSITY student, both in regular and international classes, to have an interactive and personalized learning experience.
“Since the early 2000s, we have continued to develop an e-learning system, which resulted in BINUSMAYA 5.0, which we developed independently, and was successfully released in 2014 with the main function as a learning management system (LMS). We continue to update this platform regularly and have gotten tremendous enthusiasm; this situation brought us to a point where we need external assistance to accelerate the transformation of BINUSMAYA 5.0,” said Prof. Dr. Ir. Harjanto Prabowo, M.M., Rector of BINUS UNIVERSITY.
“From there, we collaborated with eComindo, one of Microsoft’s official partners specializing in LMS, to assist in developing BINUSMAYA on the Microsoft Azure platform to provide flexibility and scalability, as well as to facilitate the innovation of its features. During the development, the pandemic hit. But despite the unfortunate situation, we were grateful that we were ready to release the latest version of BINUSMAYA, named BINUSMAYA 7.0. In the first week (of learning from home), all of our classes could transition from offline to online, 85% of classes ran smoothly, followed by 100% of classes running safely without significant problems in the second week of online lectures,” continued Prof. Harjanto.
After over two years, BINUSMAYA 7.0 has become BINUS UNIVERSITY’s technology-based learning center. Not only as a modern classroom: a medium for lecturers to teach and students to learn, BINUSMAYA 7.0 also allows students to see lectures and exam schedules, access learning materials – both in e-book and multimedia formats, work and submit assignments, view grades, engage in interactive discussions with lecturers and fellow students – including through video conferencing, as well as taking care of administrative matters such as tuition fee payment, scholarship arrangement, internship permits, and certificate collection. Everything can be done online, both on desktop and mobile.
Prof. Harjanto continued, “Now, as the pandemic situation has gradually improved, BINUSMAYA 7.0 remains the main foundation of education at BINUS UNIVERSITY. This is because the effectiveness and convenience of BINUSMAYA 7.0, which greatly benefited us during the pandemic, remains a necessity. For instance, with the blended learning concept that we have implemented since the beginning of the 2022-2023 academic year, students in their third semester and above are free to choose whether they will attend their classes offline or online. This policy gives students flexibility and encourages them to take responsibility for their choices.”
“As for first-year students, attending all classes offline is mandatory so they can emotionally connect with their classmates and lecturers at campus. However, BINUSMAYA 7.0 remains their go-to platform –to obtain information, assignments, and even to catch up on learning materials if they cannot attend the class,” added Prof. Harjanto.
“By intensively conducting socialization sessions, more than 45.000 active students and 1,600 BINUS UNIVERSITY lecturers registered in the 2022-2023 academic year continue to use BINUSMAYA 7.0 regularly. This is one of our ways to provide a modern international quality education that suits the needs and development of industry. In the future, together with eComindo and Microsoft, we will continue to develop BINUSMAYA 7.0 to make it a super app that will facilitate Binusian’s (BINUS UNIVERSITY students) daily life,” concluded Prof. Harjanto.
The scalability and security aspects are the main elements to help ensure that BINUSMAYA 7.0 can be trusted and utilized by more students and lecturers, so that it can continue to modernize classrooms in the future.
“In line with our commitment to support inclusive economic growth for all, aligning the development of education with the technology industry is critical. This is because through the modernization of education, we can democratize access to education and prepare qualified digital talents who can accelerate Indonesia Digital 2045. We hope that Microsoft Azure-based learning management system, which is built on trust and security, can help empower and improve the future digital capabilities and skills of BINUS UNIVERSITY students, regardless of their background, age, and type of education,” concluded Fiki Setiyono, Country Lead Azure Business Group, Microsoft ASEAN.
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*Results of the National Socioeconomic Survey of the Central Bureau of Statistics, March 2022
**Data from Higher Education Database, October 2022