FIRST RESULT-THE TIA APPLICATION FOR STUDENTS' MANAGING TALENT IN DISTANCE HIGHER EDUCATION

Abstract

The concept and practice of managing student talents and interests must be taken very seriously. Students are valuable human beings with high-value assets for themselves, universities, jobs, institutions, and society. Therefore, the campus's role is needed to develop students' soft skills. Distance higher education provides more expansive openness to the public for access to higher education wherever they are without age restrictions. However, the participation of distance education students is not optimal in non-academic activities. Because they do not know their talents and interests, the ages are very diverse, the student domiciles are spread out, and they do not find the right place to express their aspirations. Meanwhile, more soft skills can be developed in extra-curricular activities. This paper aims to develop applications measuring students' talents and interests. In achieving this goal, we assume students do not know their talents and interests. The research method is the development of the TIA (Talent and Interest Allocation) application, which measures six types of student intelligence characteristics: linguistics, logical-mathematical, musical, kinesthetics, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. The TIA application is applied to new students at Universitas Terbuka Padang in Even Semester 2022/2023. The number of respondents who participated was 1359 students from 29 study programs in 19 districts and cities of West Sumatra, Indonesia. Based on the TIA application, students directly know their dominant characteristics and get recommendations for appropriate academic and non-academic activities. Therefore, students can choose extra-curricular activities according to their talents and interests. Students can also use the results of the TIA application to assist the learning process. Students can choose a variety of learning sources according to dominant characteristics and anticipate their weaknesses by practicing new skills. This paper benefits students, universities, human resource practitioners, and policymakers by providing an easy-to-use application for a talent management system in distance higher education.