Students’ Perceptions on the Implementation of Face-to-Face Tutorial in Distance Education System

Since 2013, Universitas Terbuka (UT) has been participated in ‘Bidikmisi’, a govern-ment of Indonesia program which provides scholarship for students in higher education institution. To be eligible, student must fresh graduate from senior high school, have good academic record in his/her senior high school, and faces financial limitations. Bear in mind the students’ limitation in self-directed learning, requirement to success in distance education environment, UT requires all ‘Bidikmisi’ students to attend an 8 week-sessions of face to face (F2F) tutorial sessions for all courses taken. This rather different approach is like a two-edged knife: positive if students accept this as benefi-cial to their learning process and negative if students consider this as reducing chances of doing other activities. To analyse students’ perception on this matter, questionnaires were developed and distributed to all ‘Bidikmisi’ students registered in the second se-mester of 2016. The questionnaires are focussed on studnets’ perception in three as-pects, namely students’ discipline to attend and to hand-in assignments in F2F tutorial sessions, tutors’ quality, and role of F2F tutorial for mastering learning materials. Dur-ing August-October 2016, the questionnaires were send to eight purposively chosen UT Regional Offices (ROs) and further distibuted to all Bidikmisi students in the UT ROs. A number of 366 students filled-out and returned the questionnaires. The results showed that almost all of the respondents attended the tutorial sessions, handed-in all assignment, perceived tutors as dsicipline and providing enough feedback, and the ses-sions helped the respondents doing their final exams.