DEVELOPMENT OF A PRACTICAL COURSE GUIDE DIGITAL BOOK FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION (ECE) STUDENTS

Abstract

The ECE Department at Universitas Terbuka has the vision to produce excellent ECE teachers through the Open and Distance Learning (ODL) system. To ensure the achievement of the vision, it is necessary to develop appropriate competencies. The competence of ECE teachers is very thick with teaching skills, so the lecture material also needs to contain a lot of exercises and practical assignments. Therefore, the ECE-UT Department has 12 practical courses, namely courses that require practical assignments as a learning experience. So that students can practice correctly, it is necessary to make a comprehensive guide so that it can be used easily by students and tutors. So far, there is no specific practical guide for the ECE-UT study program. Some practical assignment provisions are only submitted via Technical Instructions or Catalogs. This study aims to develop a digital guide for practical courses in the ECE-UT Study Program. This research was carried out in 2022 and is the final stage of 3 stages of research starting in 2020. The research method used is Research & Development adopted from Borg & Gall (2007), especially in stages 8 and 9, namely operational field testing and final product revision. The research product was revised based on input from 25 tutors and 121 ECE students from the previous draft, namely a practice guidebook in PDF form. The inputs from these users are: need to be made in detail for each course and need to make navigation to make it easier for students to read.  The result of this research is a digital book of ECE-UT practice course guide that utilizes an exelearning application to make it easier to navigate while reading. Each course is packaged in the same sub-chapters, namely: understanding, course learning outcomes, tutorial patterns, practical assignments, tutorial kits, and assessment systems.