Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi is moving some of its 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 that decisions were being treated case by case, where the impact of fuel costs was greatest.
The majority of students lived out of the Whakatāne region and came 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 drew students from as far as Northland and Invercargill, and the cost was not being felt evenly across the entire student body.
He said about 10% of the student body had raised concerns, but he believed almost all would be feeling the price pinch.
Auckland University students have started a petition calling for free public transport and financial support, saying fuel prices are affecting students disproportionately.
At the wānanga, the School of Undergraduate Studies has contacted students to say teaching for its programmes will move online from April 1 until the end of June. The situation would be reassessed for the second semester.
Te Whāre Wānanga o Awanuiārangi CEO Professor Wiremu Doherty.
The wānanga’s two key goals were to support students to ensure that they still had access to study and that staff could still deliver courses to students, Doherty said.
“To a certain extent, it is reacting, but it’s reacting at a pace and time that we are ... controlling. You know, we’re not having it sort of forced over the top of us, but, 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 tension there, within particularly te ao Māori, where, you know, a lot of our practices require an in-person, in-situ, face-to-face medium.”
Covid also accelerated the development of infrastructure to deliver courses online. Doherty said there were no structural issues should the wānanga decide to go completely online again, at least for a while.
“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.
“As we saw through Covid, not everyone is in the same situation, and we have to be mindful some of them might be feeling it more keenly than others, and we’ve just got to be mindful and revert back to our common principle, and that’s look after each other and make sure we’re all doing okay.”
