Designing LANSKARA: A Digital Learning Module Grounded in South Sumatran Landscapes for Creative Writing Instruction

Abstract

Creative writing instruction for pre service Indonesian language teachers faces a persistent gap between students' digital readiness and their mastery of genre specific writing conventions, a gap made more urgent by evidence that generative artificial intelligence tends to homogenize collective creative output (Doshi & Hauser, 2024). This study reports the diagnostic stage of developing LANSKARA (Lanskap Sumatra Selatan dalam Aksara), a web based digital module that anchors six creative writing genres in five South Sumatran landscapes, namely the Musi River, the Ogan Ilir wetlands, Meranjat Forest, Kemaro Island, and Ampera Bridge. Following the three phase Alessi and Trollip research and development model (Burhan et al., 2024), data were gathered through a needs analysis questionnaire completed by 46 Menulis Kreatif students and a diagnostic pretest completed by 68 students. The questionnaire showed strong readiness for digital instruction and near universal demand for landscape based stories, guided writing practice, a real time writing convention assistant, and a searchable glossary of local terms, each endorsed by more than ninety percent of respondents. The pretest produced an overall class accuracy of only 45 percent, with the weakest performance found in point of view conventions, poetic imagery, drama script formatting, and treating landscape as a meaningful narrative setting. Notably, only 17 percent of students reported experiencing obstacles in creative writing, revealing a mismatch between perceived and demonstrated competence. These findings provide empirical grounds for LANSKARA's content structure and its embedded formative feedback features, and they support place based digital storytelling as a counterweight to AI driven content homogenization.