Vice Rector of Research, Innovation, and Partnership of ITB, Prof. Bambang Riyanto Trilaksono said that one of the important indicators in THE ranking is International Outlook. In that regard, ITB needs more education or research programs that involve overseas students and lecturers.

According to Bambang, international programs such as student exchange, summer courses, field study and many other activities that involve overseas students are important to widen their experiences.

“The significance of involving overseas students is to give our students the experience to interact with overseas students. Since working places are getting more global, interaction and this cross culture are important for students,” he said.

In order to enhance international outlook, ITB have conducted joint research and joint education with overseas researchers and will continue to improve over time. ITB currently have overseas lecturers teaching in several faculties or visit ITB for short course.

On the newest release, ITB’s ranking drops after in the last two years ITB always sat on 800-1000. The methodology that THE uses on their ranking is citations (30%), research (30%), teaching (30%), industry income (2.5%), and international outlook (7.5%). This year, ITB receives scores in Teaching (22.0), Research (16.7), Citations (16.3), Industry Income (89.9) and International Outlook (34.0).

Improvement to Citations

Bambang added that number of citations is a challenge for universities in Indonesia. Number of citation itself indicates how frequent others cited ITB’s publication. “It shows the influence or impact of publications. The more ours are cited by other publications, the bigger the impact is. It means that the added value to the publication is also better,” he said.

The next important factor on THE ranking is reputation since both Teaching and Research indicators includes the component of reputation survey. He hopes that ITB will score better on every indicator of THE ranking, and that will require the contribution of all stakeholders of ITB.