Outreach at University of Malta

Our last day in Malta was spent doing outreach again, this time at the University of Malta. We set up on a few tables in front of a fountain at the university and deployed the ROV into the fountain. Both students and professors gradually came over to our display, curious about what we were doing. After giving a few interviews and answering questions about the research we've been doing in Malta, we let the students and professors drive the ROV a bit around the fountain. We even attached a wrench to some foam and threw it into the water for them to retrieve with the ROV -- a potentially non-trivial task. In the end the outreach was a success and we met many people who were eager to learn about robotics and the work we've been doing.

A History of Post-Secondary Maltese Engineering Educations

Last week, the ICEX faculty had the opportunity to meet Professor Carmel Pulè, faculty in the Department of Electronics Systems Engineering at the University of Malta. Dr. Pulè has played an influential role in the development of engineering education in Malta during the last 45 years. He graciously shared his contact information with the faculty, and I contacted him by email earlier this week to ask him about the similarities and differences of the engineering educations provided by MCAST and University of Malta.

His response was fiery and passionate, but well informed and based on an experience with the Maltese education system that few others have had. I’m lucky to be able to hear his story, and am excited to share it. The following is a summary of his account of the history of the Maltese engineering education. It largely focuses on the history of the development of the different engineering degrees offered today by the University of Malta and the Malta College of Arts, Science, and Technology (MCAST). In my next and final blog post, I will discuss some of the statistics concerning the two post-secondary schools and elaborate on the ways in which this history has affected each institution.

**Some comments about the Institutions of Education in Malta by Professor Carmel Pulè (18 Mar 2012), summarized by Erik Nelson **

Malta lived under British rule for around 150 years (up until 1964), so most of the economy was devoted to establishing and maintaining a skilled workforce for military needs. The British established their own schools in Malta that trained Maltese students in naval studies, military technique, and other similar forms of education. Of these schools, the Dockyard Naval School at Senglea was the best, manned by extremely qualified British teachers. Most students graduating from this school followed a six-year trade apprenticeship and the best students were given an opportunity to go to Britain and proceed to work at Chatham, Devonport, and Portsmouth. Some of these highly skilled Maltese would then return to Malta. (Note: The important role of the Dockyard Naval School as a site of technical education had previously been highlighted for us by Timmy Gambin during our tour of the Maritime Museum the first week.)

In addition to the post-secondary educational opportunities provided by the British military, in the time period prior to independence in 1964, there was the old University of Malta, which had been established by the Knights of Saint John 400 years earlier. At the time, the university focused on arts, culture, and education in the traditional professions of law, medicine, and religion. It offered no Engineering courses. (Research prior to our trip indicates that the size of the student population at the University in the 1950s was approximately 200 students per year.) This lack of attention to technical education was mirrored in Maltese teacher training colleges and at the Lyceum – the “junior college” that students attended in between secondary education and enrollment at the University of Malta.

Since the University of Malta did not provide any engineering degrees, pathways to technical education that were not provided by the British military were largely apprenticeship-based. A number of vocational schools were established beginning in 1945. However, these trade schools were not primarily focused on producing academically trained engineers. (An exception to the lower-level vocational-only focus was the Technical College at Paula, which offered Ordinary and Higher National Certificates and Journey Men Certificates and produced students who were able to compete successfully against other students in the British Commonwealth and whose degrees were recognized abroad.)

Up until 1960 (aside from the years of World War II), life in Malta was tranquil. The country had gotten used to its tie to Britain, and had sufficient economic influx to maintain its peaceful lifestyle. However, circa 1960 it became clear that Britain would not be able to continue financial support for its ‘oversea empire’, including Malta. Maltese politicians and educators became aware of this, and realized that secondary and post-secondary education should be shifted in such a way that the product of the University of Malta would be a labor force for a self-supporting nation. This labor force would be, by necessity, largely composed of engineers. The University of Malta did not agree with this outlook, and continued to offer its traditional degrees while rejecting the development of courses in engineering.

Meanwhile, Britain (in conjunction with UNESCO) decided to finance a new technical institution in Malta called the Malta College of Arts, Science, and Technology (MCAST). The goal of this new college was the same as the goal of the aforementioned Maltese politicians: to produce workers whose skills would be useful to a competitive independent economy post-independence. The subjects included were mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, tourism, finances, accounting, and economics.

After independence in 1964, the Maltese government did force the University of Malta to offer degrees in engineering. Students who could meet the admittance qualifications at the University of Malta – which involved Religious and Maltese Language qualifications – were able to earn B.Sc degrees in engineering at the University. Students who did not meet the Religious and Maltese Language qualifications were able to earn a Diploma in Engineering at

MCAST instead by taking the same coursework. Professors from MCAST – such as Professor Pulè, who had returned from England in 1969 to take a leadership position at MCAST – were required to teach the B.Sc as well as the Diploma students, but were not offered any additional compensation for doing so (in contrast to the medical doctors at St. Luke’s who also taught at the University and received additional salary). For Professor Pulè, who was the first Maltese to earn a PhD in engineering, this continued lack of respect for academically focused engineering education by the University was incredibly frustrating.

Thus, while the University had yielded to the government in a sense, it still refused to shift its focus from the arts, culture, and traditional professions of medicine, law, and religion to the work that Professor Pulè and the Maltese government had identified as necessary – producing a highly skilled, technically focused workforce for an independent Malta. The University also continued to refuse to offer degrees in finances and accounting or to increase attention to the training of secondary teachers who were qualified in technical fields.

The situation came to a head in 1978, when the Maltese government (under the leadership of Prime Minister Mintoff) cut funding to the University of Malta because of its refusal to make these changes. The “Old University” literally disappeared from the map. MCAST was shut down at nearly the same time, and its entire staff, all of its students, and its subjects were transferred to the “New University of Malta.” The New University had roughly ten times as many students as the Old University (a total of 10,000 students), and initially focused only on offering degrees with direct economic benefit (such as engineering and tourism). As Professor Pulè put it, “the modern professors [had] stepped in to University surroundings.” Many faculty members from the Old University left Malta and took positions in England and Saudi Arabia.

Beginning in the 1980s, the (New) University of Malta began to expand its focus to teach all the old subjects plus the new subjects of Engineering, Science, Mathematics and Computer Science. Today, the University has many associated subject institutes focused on topics such as sustainable energy. However, in Professor Pulè’s opinion, even the technical courses in today’s University of Malta have become too soft and theoretical, with not enough emphasis on hands-on work and hardware. Its engineering degrees have less lab-based courses than most other universities, and the work with computers largely focuses on accounting, economics, banking, video games, and personal media communication rather than embedded systems, image processing, and robotics. According to Professor Pulè, this means that Malta has recently lost out on investing and manufacturing opportunities with international companies such as Lufthansa.

Thus, Professor Pulè began to work in the 1990s for the opening of a new MCAST that would provide more hands-on education. The goal of this process was to produce high-caliber engineers who have a firm technical and hands-on background. His desire came true, and the “New MCAST” opened in 2000.

However, Professor Pulè is not entirely satisfied with the new MCAST. According to him, the new MCAST had a slow start due to the fact that it was under staffed and poorly funded. Initially, instructors from the old trade schools were hired, many of whom did not have proper university qualifications. Additionally, Professor Pulè believes that the examination standards of MCAST are not sufficient. While MCAST offers ample hands-on training, Professor Pulè has found the opposite problem from the new University of Malta: the coursework of MCAST is not theoretical in the least. For example, MCAST’s course in Plant Maintenance does not include thermodynamics – a topic necessary to the class. While Professor Pulè was excited that Professor Maurice Grech was brought in to take over MCAST approximately five years ago, he is concerned that the degrees awarded by MCAST are not equivalent to engineering degrees at other universities. More broadly, Professor Pulè is concerned that the standards of admission to both MCAST and the University of Malta, and examination while at university, are too low.

Today Professor Pulè remains hopeful about the development of his vision of high quality engineering education in Malta. He continues to believe that Malta must produce high-caliber, technically focused, creative engineers, educated via a combination of theoretical and hands-on training in order to create a truly independent and successful Malta. At the same time, Professor Pulè sees a continued role for vocational training. Above all, Professor Pulè wants Malta, its government and its citizens, to commit to the hard work of the development of a practical workforce and to maintaining high standards in its educational system.

References:

[1] Pulè, Carmel. "A Few Questions about MCAST vs. University of Malta." E- mail interview. 18 Mar. 2012.

Maltese Engineering Education Update

This past Tuesday, professor Simon Fabri from the University of Malta came to a site that we were mapping with two of his upper division students. They were working on similar robotics projects, and visited to check out how we were collecting data. Midway through the day Brent and I stepped aside with them to ask a few questions about our respective research projects.

My research topic aims to examine the similarities and differences between engineering educations awarded from Malta's two main tertiary academies: University of Malta and Malta College of Arts, Science, and Technology (MCAST). I was able to compile a few facts about each school from research done in the states, but was crippled by the distance between myself and primary resources who could tell me their first hand accounts of trends in my topic. Now that I'm here, things the research is coming along quickly.

Professor Fabri told me that being a professor at University of Malta, naturally, he had more experience with the education offered there. He said that the department of engineering was broken into 6 majors, with 2 different BS degrees offered. Mechanical, Manufacturing, and Materials/Metallurgy fed into a Mechanical Engineering BS, while Electronics, Electrical Power, and Systems fed into an Electrical Engineering BS. University of Malta also offers a 'masters by research' degree, which takes ~13 months to complete. At the moment there are about 30 students per faculty member in that program. Normally, a degree from U of M takes 4 years, but in special cases (such as the case of the two students accompanying Prof. Fabri), a degree can be completed in 3.

From what I have heard and read about the two universities, University of Malta offers traditional engineering degrees, while MCAST is a polytechnic university that offers degrees to fill a gap at the technician level. MCAST was not created for this reason, but because it is a new university it is still in the process of stabilizing itself. I have an interview lined up with Professor Carmel Pule, a professor at University of Malta who led the division of the two universities in 1978. Hopefully I will have much more information on the matter with the arrival of his response.

One thing that stood out from the interview with Professor Fabri was that engineering students at the University of Malta do not have any general education courses. Their coursework is entirely engineering based, and all of their general education is provided by the two years of school prior to tertiary education. As a student from a polytechnic university who takes one or two general education courses every quarter, to me this was quite a different way of completing a degree.

This is a rough synopsis of my research in Malta so far, and in the next blog post I will dive into more depth with some of the statistics comparing the two universities.

Cultural Update - Engineering Degrees in Malta

Hi everyone!

Last week in our ES410 class, we gave final presentations that detailed our ethnic studies research papers and how we would be collecting data. Seeing as our ICEX team is splitting off from the rest of the class in one week, we will be completing our projects while in Malta! This gives our team some exciting benefits such as the ability to conduct on-site interviews and publish a primary source document.

My research project is on the difference between the engineering educations offered at Malta's two main tertiary educational facilities: University of Malta and Malta College of Art, Science and Technology (MCAST). The final product of my research will be in two segments. I will have a formal document, and online information that will go up on our website that will discuss the similarities and differences between the two schools. I intend to include information from interviews (WHEW! what an alliteration!) with professors from both universities discussing the degree to which the engineering work at each school could be considered "hands on" or "strictly theoretical". I would also like to include information about the reason for the formation of MCAST back in the 1970s. Both parts of my research project will come into a more clear context once we take off for Malta, so for right now I will wrap this up by saying that I am very excited to have this opportunity!