The University of Malta’s Islands & Small States Institute is no stranger to online teaching, as its Masters of Arts on Islands and Small States, by research, has been mostly run online for the past two years.
“Foreign students who usually apply for this degree come from far away regions including the Pacific Ocean, the Caribbean Sea and the Indian Ocean, and staying in Malta would be very expensive for them”, Director of the Islands and Small States Institute, Prof. Lino Briguglio told Newspoint about the take-up of this course, which usually includes foreign students.
While at the moment, students are expected to visit Malta for two weeks to follow a few study units face-to-face, the Institute is now planning to offer the courses fully online.
Asked about his views on whether remote teaching can replace the physical classroom, Prof. Briguglio thinks “given the latter mode of instruction has various advantages, including physical interaction and participation in University life, it is unlikely that this will ever be replaced, but one cannot dismiss the pros of online course offerings – tuition is cheaper to run, offered at a lower cost, and possibly attracting more foreign students – resulting in further internationalisation of tertiary education. Saving on time and costs associated with travelling are other perks for students and lecturers alike”.
No matter what mode of tuition is used, the quality of the tuition and the knowledge being shared should be maintained, both by those doing the teaching, those doing the learning, and all those undertaking the research.
The Islands & Small States Institute has three research platforms, dealing with climate change, health and island tourism respectively. In fact, these platforms serve as the basis of a methodological framework to explain why small states can still thrive economically if they adopt appropriate policies to withstand their economic vulnerability.
“Such constraints would be high exposure to external shocks & a limited ability to reap the benefits of economies of scale”, Prof. Briguglio said.
This approach is labelled as the Vulnerability & Resilience Framework, and has been used by the Commonwealth Secretariat to identify policy approaches that can be adopted by small states to counteract the negative effect of external shocks, as well as assess what measures can be used by a country to recover from the negative effects of adversities.
Prof. Briguglio wrote an Occasional Paper which was published last January, in which he named The University of Malta as the oldest university among the world’s small island states.
Giving a concluding note on the current adversity being faced by everyone across the world, Prof. Briguglio said “states which were not previously considered particularly vulnerable could potentially becoming vulnerable depending on their policy responses – there are certain risks that are difficult to quantify but that may have long-lasting consequences, therefore how a country deals with them will determine how optimistic their aftermath will be.”