Adrift in the Pacific with only the Internet

Sue Farran, University of the South Pacific

Sue’s paper offers an illustration from experience outside the UK of what you can do when you find yourself without the tools you expected!

It is sometimes said that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. Well, that is certainly true in the South Pacific. The University of the South Pacific (USP) is one of only two regional universities in the world. It has around 10,000 students, is owned and governed by 12 member countries and is spread across 33 million square kilometres of ocean. To reach our students you need more than a canoe.

The School of Law is located on one island in an archipelago of islands which make up the Republic of Vanuatu, one of the member countries of the university. There are about 200 on-campus students and many more than that studying at a distance at degree and sub-degree level. The LLB is a qualifying law degree for practice in the egion. Students thereafter undergo an eight month Practical Diploma in Law and then are ready to enter practice or to serve a further period of apprenticeship, depending on their home jurisdiction. Law graduates are expected to, and do, take up posts of seniority relatively rapidly, especially in the public sector; such is the need for skilled and educated people in these small developing countries. For all students, a degree is important for employment purposes. However, not all graduates can be absorbed into their own systems, and may have to, or want to, take other paths. The law degree therefore has to do many things.

It also has to be a regional law degree – no easy task when students come from over 12 different jurisdictions. To be relevant to students of these island countries the degree must draw on and refer to the laws in force in all the countries. Here a range of problems are met:

• there are very few official law reports and those that do exist are not up to date
• collections of legislation are kept in State Law Offices in the countries of origin, not always in electronic form

• there are very few text books or academic treaties on the laws of the region

This makes course writing a challenge. One of the major projects of the law school has been to build an electronic database of Pacific law material so that students, lawyers and researchers can access it easily. Today there are probably as many cases held electronically as in hard copy for most jurisdictions of the region. At the same time, almost all teaching requires research to underpin it. Here you cannot be a lecturer unless you are also a researcher.

The law programme also has to be able to reach a range of students. Students are not only studying on-campus, but also off-campus, sometimes in locations where there is no postal service, few telephones, only occasional air or sea links, earthquakes and cyclones. The university has from the outset – it was set up in 1968 – provided distance education via print-based materials. It also has an extensive satellite and cable network for delivering courses to centres located in all the member countries – there are 17 campuses in total. More recently the university has established its own audiovisual net link so that classes, and indeed administrative meetings, can be held across the ocean as if students and staff are in the same room. The law school has taken this distance delivery a stage further by developing a range of courses available by Internet and intranet. Today students can study nearly half of their degree from a distance.

Physical context

The tropical region of the university is largely sea – 33 million square kilometres, in which there are some 2,000 islands making up the groupings of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. Many islands are uninhabited, some barely above sea level. Some are still volcanic, others tiny coral atolls in a geographic region prone to cyclones, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Many islands have only intermittent boat services, some have access by air onto small grass runways which may be prone to flooding, grazing cattle or land disputes. All the member countries of the university – of which there are 12 – have one international airport, although they do not always have any airplanes or may be unable to use the airport due to land disputes, civil war or adverse weather. Flights between member countries are infrequent – for example, there is only one flight a week between Vanuatu and Fiji and one to Solomon Islands.

The university is one of only two regional universities in the world – the other being the University of the West Indies. It was founded in 1968, having been established under a Royal Charter in Fiji. The main campus is in Fiji and there are two other campuses, one in Samoa and one in Vanuatu. The School of Law is located in Vanuatu along with the Pacific Language Unit, the Early Childhood Education Unit and the Vanuatu Centre for Distance Education. The campuses are linked by telephone, by satellite and by their own intranet. The countries which are members of the university are: Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Tonga, Tokelau, Tonga, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu.

Educational context

The university seeks to attract a wide range of entrants, and that is true of the law school programmes as much as any other. Law is offered at pre-degree level (through certificate courses), largely for para-legals and those who are in employment and wish to upgrade their knowledge and skills. In some countries of the region a certificate is sufficient to be employed as a magistrate or to appear in court. Certificate level studies may also be undertaken as a foundation for degree studies, especially where a student is a non-standard entrant. There is limited cross-accreditation of certificate courses to degree courses.

At degree level there is a range of entrants, from school leavers to mature students, who may have had a number of years of experience in relevant professions such as the police, lands department or government ministries or the courts (as court clerks or magistrates), or in non-related professions. Some students may also enter having never completed secondary schooling, but having worked their way through foundation level and preliminary level courses offered by the university so that they are now eligible to enter degree studies.

For those students who have completed secondary level education, their experiences may be very different. Some may have studied on scholarships or as private students in New Zealand, Australia or even the United States. Others will have attended secondary school on remote islands with very little sophisticated equipment or infrastructure. Secondary education throughout the region is geared at passing examinations. Learning by rote and regurgitation of facts is commonplace, especially in island countries where education is a luxury, is not free and not all applicants to secondary schools, even if eligible and willing to pay, can secure places. Almost all the students are the first of their families to enter university. Many are sponsored directly or indirectly through their governments by aid donors such as New Zealand and Australia. The availability of scholarship funding in any one year will depend on government and aid donor preferences, and priorities and may also depend on ethnic identity.

The language of tuition of the university is English. For most students this will be their second, third or fourth language.

Legal context

The law school is dedicated to teaching the law of the South Pacific region, that is the law of the 12 member countries of the university as well as that of the Federated States of Micronesia, because we have students from there. At the same time the law of the region’s nearest neighbours – Australia and New Zealand – cannot be ignored, especially because of its influence on modern developments. It is also necessary to keep abreast of developments elsewhere in the common law world, partly because some countries still follow English law precedents (for example, Tonga) and because the common law of England forms the basis of introduced law into the region under colonial rule – either directly or via one of the other former colonies (Australia and New Zealand).

This approach to law teaching is necessarily comparative, and quite burdensome. Students expect to be taught about the laws of their own country, but the university also considers it important that every student learns about the laws of neighbouring countries, especially as regional initiatives to harmonise laws or to formulate regional responses to common legal dilemmas requires understanding of each other’s legal approaches. The task of the law lecturer would be a great deal easier if it could be assumed that locating the laws – legislation, case law and commentary – of each country in the region is just a matter of pulling it off a shelf. This is not the case. First, there are very few official collections of case reports. A great many which did exist stopped at independence, and since then law reports have been sporadic, often incomplete and generally private. Copies of legislation are often extremely hard to obtain, even from the Attorney General or State Law Office of a country. Copies of gazettes or their equivalent are very limited in number and often deteriorate in the climate. For example, all the archives of pre-independent Vanuatu are housed in a building which has been condemned and therefore closed since January 2002, due to an earthquake. There is also relatively little written commentary on the laws of legal systems of the region.

The law school itself is less than ten years old, and the first law graduates completed their studies in 1997. Since its establishment the law school has produced a considerable amount of material including journal articles, textbooks and research papers. Earlier work has also been produced by social anthropologists, other faculties of the university and academics at universities in New Zealand and Australia, notably Victoria University, Wellington, the Australian National University and Monash. Compared to legal academic writing in any major country the collection remains very limited.

In many areas of the law it is also necessary to take into account customary law, as this remains an important influence, especially in the fields of private civil law, but also constitutional law and criminal law. Most customary law remains however unwritten.

Employment context

Most law students completing their studies are hoping for a career in the law. Many hope to find employment in private practice, because it is more lucrative than the public sector. The possibilities of finding work outside the region are very limited, unless students also hold New Zealand citizenship, as is the case with Cook Islands and citizens of Niue. Even then it would be unlikely that law students would enter the law in these foreign countries as had they intended to do, so they would study in these countries – and some do. Despite being relatively young the number of graduates with LLB degrees has steadily increased, and in some countries graduates are already finding it difficult to find legal jobs. Unstable economies in much of the region mean that even those who do find work may not get paid – a current problem in Solomon Islands and Nauru. Ethnic tensions elsewhere may also have an adverse impact on employment – as with Indo Fijians in the public sector in Fiji – or may impact on the whole employment market – as in Solomon Islands. What would appear to westerners to be nepotism, but may be viewed as no more than tribalism locally, is rife.

Key challenges and responses facing the development of a workable curriculum

The key challenges facing the development of a workable curriculum are content, delivery, and assessment.

Content

The development of syllabi outlines for the LLB were the product of an extensive working conference involving external academics in 1996. The LLB had to be designed to serve the region and yet be comparable with an LLB degree from outside the region. As with any degree, if it was to serve the needs of the profession and the region it had to cover certain subject areas but at the same time have sufficient scope for flexibility of focus in a region of developing and newly independent countries. Prior to the launching of degree studies at the university law undergraduates had tended to study elsewhere and then return to the region with their law degrees, for example the University of Papua New Guinea, Waikato in New Zealand or from Australian universities. The degrees achieved were barely regional.

USP developed a four year full time degree, with students taking four modules in each of the two semesters. Of these five are compulsory in the first year, the entire second year is compulsory, four are compulsory in the third year and three in the final year. Course content was, where possible to be regional, and not simply English common law.

It was also important that the degree meet the academic requirements of legal practice for the various national bars in the region. This required considerable lobbying, and disparities in admission procedures are still evident today. Some countries require further vocational training – which is offered in a six month course in Fiji by the Institute of Justice and Applied Legal Studies, and some require periods of apprenticeship or articles. Elsewhere a graduate can practice on the strength of the LLB alone, or even on the basis of a Law Certificate.

It was also important to recognise that the market for lawyers is potentially small and could quite quickly become saturated. From the outset it was intended that the LLB be a degree not just directed at practice but offer flexible employment opportunities. To this end the first year of the degree is a broad foundation year, with only three law courses out of the eight taken in one year. The other courses are drawn from economics, politics, social organisation, history, English language – the official language of instruction of the university – and two elective subjects, which may be from any discipline.

Essentially the degree is an academic not a vocational degree. Increasingly however there is an emphasis on skills, and assessment of these is being introduced as well as analysis of a matrix of skills across courses.

In order to broaden the potential for law graduates a BA/LLB has recently been launched so that students can combine two major disciplines, taking a single major in management, accounting or arts, alongside an LLB based on the compulsory subjects. A postgraduate LLM degree, which may be taken as a taught or a thesis based masters, was launched in 2000.

In order to address the difficulties of regional legal sources considerable effort has been made to develop links with key players in the region, in particular Chief Justices and Attorney Generals, in order to acquire case reports and legislation. Often this has entailed physicalvisits to the respective island countries. This material has been put online and the law school now holds the largest Pacific database in the world. Much of this has recently been merged with AustLII (Australian Legal Information Institute) to form PacLII (Pacific Islands Legal Information Institute). Library links with other sources are also Web-based. Funding for much of this has had to be sought from outside sources, and money has been obtained from Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The quid pro quo for judicial and legislative services co-operating with the law school on this is that they now have a large, free electronic resource to use.

Delivery

The delivery of courses has to cater for students both on- and off-campus. The university has always had a policy supportive of distance education. Initially, and for a long time, this has been based on paper or hard copy materials, consisting of course materials and readers. This text package, available to students through university centres located on each member country’s main island are supplemented by tutorials held at the centres, where student numbers justify this. Tutorials are delivered to distant students via satellite. Each centre has a room in which a lecturer or tutor can sit and conduct a tutorial by audio link. Where numbers justify it the centres employ local tutors to run tutorials for local students. The centres are budgetary units and have autonomy in this matter. By and large law tutorials are only held locally in Fiji.

There are many logistical problems in the writing, production and delivery of text-based courses for distance delivery. Work has to be completed a long time ahead of the teaching year, because of the need to print and disseminate the material to far off places. Until the end of this year (2002) this process has been handled centrally by the University Extension Services located in Suva. For law this has been a real difficulty, as all material has to go backwards and forwards from Vanuatu to Fiji. Much of this can now be done electronically, but proofs still tend to be sent by postbag – which only travels once a week. In the last few years the law school has moved towards developing courses on the Internet, available to students both on- and off-campus. These courses are supported by audiovisual tutorials delivered over the USP Net. This is a also a satellite network, which links the campuses and centres of the university and has the advantage of allowing a tutor or lecturer to conduct a single tutorial for students in different countries provided they can get to a USP Net facility. Where students cannot access this technology then communication is via e-mail – all Internet courses have discussion groups – and phone/fax. The law school is also developing courses using more interactive technology, in particular a program called Zope.

Assessment

The assessment of law courses has, until fairly recently, been quite conventional. Written essays and final examinations. Increasingly weighting is given to coursework, sometimes up to 100% but more usually around 50%. Recently more diverse assessment practices have been introduced including seminar presentations, moots and debates. Some assessment is individual, some group work. Some is written, some oral. Students studying at a distance are assessed wherever possible in the same way as on-campus students. Internet students sit the same examination as on-campus students and at the same notional time, although this may be on different days in relation to the date line.

Although efforts are made to break up island groupings through the distribution of students in tutorial groups and in class work, islanders tend to study together, especially in the early years of their studies. This can lead to problems of joint work being submitted as individual work. Students who insist on not sharing resources, ideas or lecture notes can be branded as culturally insensitive or selfish by their peer group. Communal effort, the sharing of skills and co-operation in the final product are all part and parcel of Pacific Island culture and social organisation. This has its strengths and weaknesses, especially for students studying at a distance. Students are encouraged to form informal study groups and often do so. Where they are left to cope individually or in isolation they may fail or drop out. However study groups can result in virtually identical work being submitted.

Some measures have been implemented to try and offset these problems. For example, a higher percentage of marks is being awarded for tutorial participation, minimum marks for examinations are being introduced and re-consideration is being given to the percentage mark awarded for coursework. Where students are studying via Internet courses, assessment is being given to participation in discussion groups, which can be monitored by the student’s personal login details. Online self-assessment tests are also being developed.

Access to Internet materials and encouraging students to search the Web for related materials also raises problems of plagiarism. While the university has standard policies on this, as the number of students using Web-based materials grows it becomes increasingly difficult to police. One way in which it is quite easily detected with South Pacific Island students is because English is rarely their first language, and therefore fluent written expression is more of a challenge for many of them.

The law school is about to embark on greater assessment of skills across the various years of the degree. To this end an audit of skills currently being taught and developed has been undertaken. Skills gaps have yet to be identified and remedied and mechanisms for actual assessment considered. There are however models from Monash and Queensland University of Technology, as well as elsewhere, available. Once this is done it is probable that greater weighting will be placed on skills assessment than simply written assignment content.

The underpinning conception of the learning process

From the outset the university has adopted the philosophy of distance learning, and the law school has been bound to observe this philosophy. To deliver courses based on this philosophy pre-supposes that the enrolled student has access to all the materials needed for the course. This has proved to be very difficult in the case of sciences, less so in the case of humanities. Law lies in the middle ground.

The move to flexible distance learning also supposes access to a computer either linked to the Internet or able to play CDs. This is turn requires IT support, either through the university centres in the member countries or within the private resources available to the student. Underpinning this is a basic assumption about access to utilities, especially electricity, basic infrastructure and postal services – not all of which are always available or reliable.

Access to any learning material also supposes competence in the language of the university (English) and IT user skills for accessing IT-based materials. As regards the first, English competence is a compulsory requirement and is one of the mandatory courses in the first year of a law degree. Nevertheless poor English, particularly written English, is a persistent problem. The university has a specialised unit, the Centre for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching, to improve English skills. Unfortunately this is based in Fiji, and the expertise is not readily available elsewhere.

As regards IT or computer skills, training for these is in much demand with very high enrolment on basic computer courses. The difficulty for the university is finding staff to teach such courses. IT trainers can command better salaries in the private sector and beyond the region. Because of this the university has recently introduced a differential fee tariff in an attempt to generate higher income to support these courses – and to fund induced salaries to computer educators – and in an effort to cap student recruitment.

The delivery of flexible and distance learning also assumes a student centred approach to learning, often an independent or autonomous approach. This raises specific difficulties in the Pacific, where life is much more communally orientated than the in individualistic West, and students tend to work much better in groups. They also prefer to work orally rather than on written work. This is a cultural dimension to flexible and distant learning which is not always sufficiently addressed.

Conclusion

Despite some of cultural and physical differences which have an impact on legal education in the South Pacific, there are a number of similar challenges and difficulties facing the law educator, particularly once the question of distance has been overcome. The journey may be a little harder and the hazards of the tropics may create their own challenges, but in the end our aim is to provide a rich and worthwhile learning environment which enables a student to develop his or her abilities in a positive way which will stand them in good stead for the future they face outside the university.

Last Modified: 12 July 2010