CONTROLLING THE QUALITY OF FOOD PROCESSING TECHNOLOGY LAB WORKS PERFORMED DURING THE COVID-19

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, food processing technology lab works performed by the students of Universitas
Terbuka adhered to government and university-sanctioned policies. To accommodate the pandemic situation, lab
work is performed online so students can fulfil the competency targets. Being a novel system, the quality of onlinebased lab work should be continually evaluated and improved. In this study, we focus on the performance of the
online-based food technology lab work in the Universitas Terbuka. By inspecting the archived data in the Food
Processing Sub-department in the Universitas Terbuka, we found that their lab works have been appropriately
planned. Resources to assist the online-based lab works are online textbooks, lab work designs and units, online
guidelines, video tutorials, forum group discussions with the instructors, and online lab work supervision. Software
provided by the Universitas Terbuka to manage the online lab work takes care of the registration, learning, lab work,
and scoring processes. The whole resources and software are managed by staff distributed at 39 regions across
Indonesia. Despite all the effort exerted for the online-based lab work, we observe that the failure rate is as high as
11.16% nationally during the 2020-2021 academic year. The cause of the >10% failure rate for our online-based lab
work system has not been diagnosed.