18/12/2018

Hooray! Regression Back to How it Was Before for UNITECH

(Updated in May 2020. The "Hooray!" in the title is cynically used, and refers back to an earlier Hooray! article when #UNITECH was still moving forward.

Meanwhile, in January 2019 the case against me was dismissed by the courts due to lack of any evidence. Other charges were never laid in my regard.

In sum, it was all nonsense and madness, and my detractors in 6 years have never been able to show I did anything against the law. AS)

No More Internet

When I was Vice-Chancellor from 2012 to 2018, we worked hard to bring the Papua New Guinea University of Technology (PNGUoT) into the 21st century as to its basic IT-enhanced learning environment through Google Classroom, providing all students with 50% subsidized lapstops, as well as through the development of a modern, competence-based curriculum delivered in a student-centred manner. In order to improve teaching, we created the Post-Graduate Certificate on Student-Centred Teaching for all lecturers, now discontinued.

On 1 June 2015, the PNGUoT became the first university in the world to have campus-wide broadband internet through the O3B satellite system. Because of mismanagement, now it is the only university in the world where you can see the internet, but nobody can use it.

UNITECH: the only university in the world where you can SEE the internet, but can not USE it.

The current management and Council, however, decided to rent out the O3B installation to DataCo without having a backup plan. DataCo themselves have stated that they are not readily distributing the bandwidth from the new under-sea cable until September or October. Any deal with them should therefore have started in January 2021 at the earliest.

The University management seems to be making a real effort to bring the university back half a century, into the 1970s of the 20th century, intentionally or through sheer ignorance, incompetence or callousness. Of course, there are strong suspicion that greed and venality are behind all this, but we will never know, will we? Here is a sad tale of regression, which has forced me today to speak out in an effort to reverse this trend.