RESULTS
E- COUNSELING SERVICE MODEL DEVELOPMENT USING EXTREME PROGRAMMING (A CASE STUDY AT SYARIF
HIDAYATULLAH STATE ISLAMIC UNIVERSITY JAKARTA)
Bambang Suryadi, Qurrotul Aini, Meinarini Catur Utami Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University Jakarta
Email: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] ,
Abstract: In the twenty-first century, the use of information and communication technology in the provision of counseling services is a necessity and inevitable. It is possible to provide E-Counseling services through the availability of internet facility in Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN) Jakarta. Currently the number of students, lecturers, and staffs in UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta is 23,596 people in various work units, institutions, research centers, faculty and the Graduate School. Thus, if the counseling service is provided in face to face technique, it will require a very long time because of the limited number of counselors. The purpose of research is to make the E-Counseling service available for students, lecturers, and employees of UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta by using the Extreme Programming method with Unified Modeling Language (UML), Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), My Structured Query Language (MySQL).
This application provides counseling service in an effective and user-friendly ways to the students, lecturers, and staffs.
Keywords: Counseling, E-Counseling, Extreme Programming, MySQL, UML, PHP.
INTRODUCTION
The transformation of State Islamic Institution (IAIN) Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta to become State Islamic University (UIN) Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta in 2002 has been bringing significant changes in educational services as the growing number of students, lecturers, and staffs. UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Leaders Report in Leadership Meeting 2013, held on February 6-8 in Jakarta, reported that the total number of students by December 31, 2012 was 22,173 in Bachelor Program (S1) and Graduate Programs (S2 & S3) (UIN Syahid, 2013).
Data collected by Human Resource Department showed that UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta has 478 staffs of various ranks/classifications from Junior Clerk (I/a) to Senior Administrator (IV/e). The number of faculty members is 945 lecturers varying from Instructor to Professor (UIN Syahid, 2012). Therefore, the total number of students, lecturers, and staffs in UIN Syarif Hidayatullah is 23,596 people. The population is spread into many units, such as Rector and Vice Rectors’ Office, Institutions, Centers of Studies, Bachelor Schools and Graduate School of UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta. Work complexity, workload, and work environment vary in each unit and moderately depend on psychological conditions of its lecturers, staffs, and students. Lecturers and staffs are demanded to give the best quality of educational services, whereas students are expected to earn higher grade. Due to those high demands, psychological problems occur among academic society members and staffs in UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta.
In globalization era which supported by the advanced information technology and communication, counseling service has been given not only through face to face counseling but also the electronic platform or Electronic Counseling (E-Counseling). The internet service in UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta is capable to cover the E-Counseling service. Because the face to face counseling requires more time yet the number of counselors is limited, E-counseling will serve more effectively for 23,596 academic society members and staffs in various work units in UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta. Moreover, the E-counseling will ease academic society members and staffs to get counseling whenever they feel uncomfortable to go to face to face service. Therefore, the researchers by these reasons are encouraged to develop E-Counseling service model for academic society members and staffs in UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta, to be the efficient and effective counseling service.
COUNSELING THEORIES AND TECHNIQUES
There are a lot of contemporary counseling theories and techniques a counselor can manage in providing counseling service to his/her client. According to Corey (1991) and Ehly & Dustin (1989), among many other counseling theories and techniques there are Psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud), Person-Centered theory (Carl Rogers), Reality theory (William Glasser), Transactional Analysis (Eric Berne), and Rational Emotive theory.
The implementation of those theories and techniques in providing counseling service depends on counselor and technology user competencies. A general statement of counseling that is often cited says: there is no single best theory and technique of counseling because we are dealing with human being who have unique personality.
The same case happens in teaching; there is no single technique and strategy to teach students with unique personality and individuality. For this reason a professional counselor is implied to acquire a lot of counseling theories and techniques to work with many client’s conditions and problems.
Nowadays, the utilization of information technology and communication in providing counseling service is inevitable. Forty one years ago Morril, Oetting and Hurst (1974) had predicted this; as illustrated in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1: The Dimensions of counselor functioning model. Adapted from Morrill, W.
H., Oetting, E.R., and Hurst, J.C. (1974) Dimensions of counselor functioning.
Personnel and Guidance Journal, 52, 354-359.
Based on the above figure, according to Morril et al. (1974), it is clear that the target of counselor intervention includes: (a) individuals-clients seen on a one-to-one or small group basis, (b) primary groups- groups such as family and intimate friends who most influence the individual’s self-concept, (c) associational groups-group based on choice or chance associations whose “members share a consciousness of similar interests or needs and band or join together in some organizational way to pursue those interests”, and (d) institutions or communities-collective arrangements of individual who differ from associational groups in that they do not necessarily involve any meeting of the members of the group.
The purposes of counselor intervention as shown in the Morril model involve: (a) remediation- intervention spawned by an individual’s pain or by a group’s failure, (b) prevention-intervention intended to anticipate and prevent future problems, and (c) development-intervention designed to enhance the functioning and developmental potential of healthy individual and groups.
Furthermore, Morril et al. (1974) mentioned the three methods of intervention are as follows: (a) direct service-intervention that requires direct contact between the counselor and the target, (b) consultation and training- the means by which counselors indirectly affect the target population through allied professional and paraprofessional, and (c) media-methods such as computer-assisted counseling, video-taped interview, and programmed human relations training materials by which counselors enhance and extend their influence.
In line with the counselor functioning model, it is clear that in providing counseling service a counselor needs effective and efficient media, including the utilization of information technology and communication (TIK).
Baker (2000: 2) specifically in counselor functioning in twenty-first century writes:
“In the 21st century, school counselor will probably be more effective if they are able to provide proactive program that meet and enhance developmental needs, as well as to react to demands for interventions when required. They will be challenged to meet the needs of individuals having different worldviews, as well as of those sharing the same worldviews. Wide-ranging needs and demands will probably require flexibility and a capacity for counselors to be proactive in providing services that enhance the personal and cognitive development of their student clients, help them acquire useful coping skills, and aid them in becoming multiculturally competent”.
This statement supports that a counselor’s contribution for future generation is quite significant. As a professional who is morally and socially responsible to the future of nation, counselor is committed to provide the best counseling service to client.
EXTREME PROGRAMMING
There are many types of program to develop E-Counseling model; some of which are Code/Fix, Prototyping, Staged Delivery, Waterfall, RUP, and Extreme Programming (Baird, 2002). The researchers to develop this model choose Extreme Programming (XP), an agile software development which is also one of the agile methods pioneered by Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, and Ward Cunningham. XP gives more responsive development process to customer’s (“agile”) needs than the traditional methods while we develop a better quality and most used software which is intended to give a new approach. Other researches demonstrates the utilization of agile methodology does not significantly influence the human well-being and work-related aspects.
Meanwhile, in the agile practice, such as programming, continual integration and frequent release will induce team to work closely and experience higher well-being (Omar and Abdullah, 2015).
XP is an approach which intended to improve the efficiency and flexibility in software development project by combining many simple ideas (Beck, 2000). There are four cycles of XP development, namely planning, design, coding, and testing.
Figure 2: Extreme Programming (Goto, Tsuchida and Nishino, 2014)
XP attempts to produce software quality which based on two parts underlying quality: the accuracy of requirement and the core of product (Baird, 2002). XP allows changing in product’s life cycle and attempts to improve the quality by immediately solving problems and providing constant feedbacks for products. XP provides the ability to combine the aforementioned two parameters (Baird, 2002). XP recognizes four essential values, namely communication, simplicity, and feedback (Crawford et al., 2013). The base values which contains inside Extreme Programming are (communication), (simplicity), and (feedback). Below are the foundation values that will become the soul in every steps of XP’s software development process (Baird, 2002) :
Communication
XP focuses in a good communication relationship between each team members. Each team member have to build a mutual understanding, and it is an obligation to share knowledge/skills in developing software. The urge of every high programmers are they have to push and open themselves in working together with other programmers to write program codes.
Courage
Each team member and the guarantor of development software has to always own integrity and conviction in doing their job. They have to preserve their integrity from pressures in any situations (for ex : from clients/company owners). To do anything with integrity, first we must build trust with each team members.
This trust is what XP is trying to build and invest with other aspects.
Simplicity
One of XP’s base value is simplicity. By using short and simple methods, avoiding complicated methods in making design, as well as omitting useless features. Other simple processes will always be XP’s main value.
Feedback
Giving feedback to each team member or other people who is involved in software development. By always express our thought and discuss mistakes which appear in development process. To always listen to other partner’s opinion, with this feedback, we will realize which parts are wrong or which software development we can improve.
Quality Work
All of the values will end out in a condition to do with high quality job. With a high quality process, it will implicate in the result of a high quality software as well.
Khrisna et. al (2013) investigates the development of XP implementation in various projects. He finds XP brings benefits, such as customer focus, improved teamwork and communication, estimation prior to implementation, simple and clean design, continual testing, and quality assurance. Currently, a new methodology has been developed initially from XP, namely Extreme Programming method for Innovative Software based on Systems Design (EPISODE). Its development cycles emphasize on planning, designing, coding, and evaluation to improve efficiency and creativity of open source software development in smaller group (Goto, Tsuchida, &
Nishino, 2014). Qureshi and Ikram (2015) also attempt to improve XP. They propose the initial iteration for traditional XP method; then, the incremental iteration to fulfil the expected subsystem from milestones; and lastly, the final iteration for every milestone completed.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The purpose of research is to make E-Counseling service available for students, lecturers, and staffs of UIN Syarif Hidayatullah. The service uses Morril model (Cube Model) which covers personal social counseling, academic counseling, career counseling, and family counseling services by using Extreme Programming method development and UML, PHP, MySql as tools. Research method and design are illustrated in Figure 3, where it start from the goals, we collect data to support the design and implementation of E-Counseling from observation and literature study some online service that already exist in Indonesia. There are several online services that provided by certain institution and non-government organization. Refers to data collection, we developed e- counseling corresponding to conditions in UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta, where a user such as students, university administrative staff and lecturer can use this facility.
Figure 3: Research Method
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
As clearly stated at the beginning of this article, the main purpose of research is to make the E-Counseling service available for students, lecturers, and staff of UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta by using the Extreme Programming method with Unified Modeling Language (UML), Hypertext Pre-processor (PHP), My Structured Query Language (MySQL). The next section, it will describe result of each phase of XP.
1. Exploration Phase
In the context of UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta, the categories of counseling which are academic, family and career are very relevant with the client’s condition (university students, staffs and lectures). Below are the short reviews about 4 region counselling service categories :
a. Personal-social: this service is given to clients so they will know more about themselves, to adapt and develop potentials both as an individual or citizen. This service also orientates to help clients that are related to their personal-social problems. Consists of stress, worries and confusedness difficulties in taking decisions etc.
b. Academic: This academic service is tightly related with guidance to the right way in studying to overcome difficulties in them. Among these academic problems, we can use strategies that are effective, strategies to face exams, note taking skills etc. with this academic service, clients are expected to reach their success in studying.
c. Family: This service is related to the client’s family problems in their relationship with parents/children or other family members. Their problems are variant, it could be from parent’s rearing, communication between children and parents or ways of giving them affection etc
d. Career: This service is related with job selection in work place. The problems that appear in the working world are very variant, some of them are : choosing what kind of job they want to take after they graduate on scholar, adapting in work place/company, company’s atmosphere, and interpersonal relationship with co-workers etc.
In this development of counseling service, when the counseling session is ongoing, clients can have one or more problems. For example, a client who has an academic problems cannot hide their problems from on family whether it is personal or social as well. In facing clients with more than one problem, counselors are charged to be capable in revealing their roots of problems and find solutions. With E-counselling system development, it will make the ‘Psychology problem map’ that college student, staffs and lectures of UNI Syarif Hidayatullah will face.
This map will become a very important object to analyze more by policy taker in the faculty or head office level. Besides that, this map will know how many problems that are completed or not by counselling service, so it’s needed to be reconciled/referred by a more competent side.
The system overview is described in the rich picture, the user story, and metaphor system. Overview of the current system can be seen in Figure 4. The current system is illustrated to identify problems. Figure 4 shows the complete procedure from register till set up the counseling session. First, student/university staff/lecturer comes to the counseling office/clinic and fills the counseling form for arrangement the schedule. After that, counseling staff set up the counseling schedule. Finally, the counselor and registrant (student/staff/lecturer) have a meeting as counseling service. This service has been eventually developed into a new proposed system in which users can get online counseling service. The next section is described about proposed system.
Figure 4: Rich Picture of Current System
The proposed system is illustrated in Figure 5. The user reads articles, downloads file, and sends message to counselor, then, the counselor replies user’s message. The counselor has obligation for download file, read
articles, and input testimonials. Meanwhile, Admin has tasks for manage users, counselors, download, and messages, and testimonials. A database server is a part of E-counseling as a back end of a database application using client/server architecture. It is a computer program that provides database services to other computer programs or computers, as a database storage and retrieval.
Figure 5: Rich Picture of Proposed System
Besides using rich picture, the depiction can be used by System Metaphor. System Metaphor is an abstract of the developing system. The result of this stage will be shown in picture 6 :
Date
The system developing can be linked as an online system which enable users to use a consultant’s service for their problems online without having to face them in person.