Today the University has 14 Campuses around the region, namely in Fiji, Cook Islands, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.
The USP Cook Islands Centre was officially established in 1975 under the directorship of Mr. Neville Pearson and housed at the Public Health building in Tupapa, Rarotonga. At this time the Centre was linked to the main USP Campus at Laucala using the Peacesat satellite service.
The current campus building was opened at Takamoa in 1979 and extended in 2012. The majority of the study done through Cook Islands Campus is via “distance flexible learning”. Flexible learning at USP is nothing new. Its distributed nature requires the University to engage in open and flexible approaches to learning which it has done since its inception.
Flexible learning is a state of being in which learning and teaching is increasingly freed from the limitations of the time, place and pace of study.
The need for flexible approaches to learning and teaching at USP has been growing lately out of the inability of conventional campus based educational practices to meet the growing demands for access to educational opportunity in the region. Increasingly large numbers of students both from those who are on campus and those who are at a distance from it are choosing to study by flexible learning. The regional nature of USP and the very real challenges of having students scattered over vast geographical distances led the University to be a pioneer in the mode since the early 1970’s.
