Wānanga moves some classes online amid fuel price concerns from students

Source: Radio New Zealand

Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi is moving some of their noho and on-campus classes online in response to concerns from tauira (students) that rising fuel prices would impact their ability to attend classes.

Chief executive Professor Wiremu Doherty (Tūhoe, Ngāti Tāwhaki, Ngāti Awa) told RNZ decisions are currently being treated on a case-by-case basis where the impact of fuel costs is the greatest.

The majority of students are located out in the regions and will come together for noho wānanga anywhere from every four weeks to every eight weeks, he said.

“We’ve made a decision to shift two noho scheduled to occur last week and this week to online, and it was largely at the request of students. And we’re dealing with people out in our rural and our remote communities where things are pretty tough, you know, before we were hit by the extraordinary increases in fuel.”

Doherty said the Wānanga draws students from as far as Te Hapua and Te Kao to Invercargill, and the cost is not being felt evenly across the entire student body.

He said some 10 percent of the student body have raised concerns, but he believes almost every student will be feeling the pinch from the cost of fuel.

Auckland university students have launched a petition calling for free public transport and financial support, saying fuel prices are impacting university students disproportionately.

At the Wānanga the School of Undergraduate Studies has contacted their tauira to say that all teaching for those programmes will move online from 1 April until the end of June and the situation will then be reassessed for Semester two.

“Whilst we are all on shifting sands at the moment, we can extrapolate out if costs were to remain as they are today, we could then extrapolate out that for the end of the year. But that could be irrelevant if, you know, if the costs continue to increase,” Doherty said.

The Wānanga’s two key goals were to support students to ensure that they still have access to study and staff still have the wherewithal to be able to deliver courses to students, he said.

“To a certain extent it is reacting, but it’s reacting at a pace and time that we are, you know, we’re controlling. You know, we’re not having it sort of forced over the top of us, but, you know, arguably, I guess, in one sense we are with the price setting, but it’s how we choose to respond that… I think it gives us a little bit of comfort.”

Lessons from Covid

Doherty said the Wānanga learned a few lessons from the Covid pandemic about delivering courses online, one of them being that “the world wasn’t going to end if you deliver things online.”

“We’ve always had a particular tension there within particularly Te Ao Māori where, you know, a lot of our practices require a in-person, in-situ, face-to-face medium.”

It also fast forwarded the infrastructure required to deliver courses online, Doherty said there are no structural issues in the way should they decide to go completely online again, at least for a period of time.

“But I think unlike Covid, this one is a little bit more, I guess, measured in the way that we feel we’ve got more control and have the ability to make the decision. And I think that changes things quite a bit and it also gives us the ability to respond to what the needs of our community are,” he said.

“As we saw through Covid, you know, not everyone is in the same situation and we have to be mindful, you know, some of them might be feeling it more keenly than others and we’ve just got to be mindful and, you know, revert back to our common principle and, you know, that’s look after each other and, you know, make sure we’re all doing okay.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand