FNU’s role...

As a university, to be digitally-connected with high-speed broadband and the latest educational and scientific software is to be a part of this global academic community. At Fiji National University, we recognise not just the crucial importance of being coupled to the rest of the international academy, but the way that digitisation has dramatically ‘levelled the playing field’ in our favour. Once researchers in the elite universities like Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard enjoyed unparalleled access to intellectual resources, namely book and journal collections housed in huge old libraries, and they could freely network with the world-class scholars that clustered around them in other UK and US universities. In contrast, researchers in remote, developing

countries like Fiji had to rely on old, out-of-date reference books and lacked the financial resources to interact with their peers at scholarly conferences in the developed world. Today, Fiji National University’s library is mainly digital. Staff and students can access the same e-books, e-journals and e-databases as their counterparts in Cambridge, UK, or Cambridge, Massachusetts – the home of Harvard University. They can meet virtually by email, Skype, Zoom or FaceTime with colleagues from around the world, watch keynote conference lectures on YouTube and Ted Talks and share their research using digital social media platforms like academia.edu, researchgate. com and mendeley.com. Our staff have unique ‘ORCID’ research identification numbers to distinguish them from other researchers of the same name and make it easier to communicate with the right researcher wherever they are based.” The second reason Fiji National University is so focused on the digitalFIJI programme is that it transforms the opportunities available for their graduates. We live in a small, geographically remote country where, for most of our history, commerce was restricted to the products we could make and sell to each other or, in limited cases, to neighbouring countries. Even today our economy is still heavily dependent on agriculture and tourism. Through digitalFIJI, however, our citizens are linked digitally 24/7 to each other and to the rest of the world, opening up a huge range of new opportunities for e-commerce and tech-savvy young entrepreneurs.