By Dr Alex Grech, Executive Director, Commonwealth Centre for Connected Learning (3CL)
Since its inception in 2017, the Commonwealth Centre for Connected Learning (3CL) Foundation in Malta has sought to serve as a bridge between the Commonwealth and the European Union in shaping ethical and transformative approaches to educational technology. As one of 33 Small States in the Commonwealth, Malta’s compact geography, combined with its status as the most densely populated country in the EU (316 square kilometres with over 574,000 inhabitants), provides a distinctive testbed for innovation in digital education.
Conceived as a LearnTech catalyst, 3CL serves as a hub where ideas, policy, and research converge to explore how technology can empower rather than exploit learners. 3CL’s work has consistently highlighted how small states, with their agility and close-knit communities, can pilot and refine educational models that later find global relevance.
Malta’s position as both an EU and Commonwealth member has enabled 3CL to collaborate across regions and policy frameworks. Initiatives launched in Malta have often scaled beyond its shores, such as the development of a nation-state blockchain system for verifiable, self-sovereign credentials, research on critical digital literacies and resilience to information disorders, and ongoing investigations into how generative AI reshapes the multigenerational workplace. Such initiatives reflect 3CL’s belief that small states are not peripheral actors, but pivotal contributors to global EdTech and open learning ecosystems.
Professor Godfrey Baldacchino, 3CL’s new Chair and a leading scholar on small states, reminds us that when confronted with knowledge and data, many citizens face four threats: apathy, cynicism, illiteracy, and monopoly power, just like the four ghosts chasing the video game Pac-Man. This ’race‘ must contend with at least four nuances for small states: politics is up close and personal; voter turnout is high when elections are held; specialisation must be nimble and grounded in lived reality, and everyone is at most one degree of separation away from everyone else.
The Commonwealth’s Small States share these dynamics, but they also bring a remarkable capacity to experiment, adapt, and collaborate. Their scale enables them to implement systemic innovations more quickly than larger nations, often hindered by bureaucracy or fragmentation. They can model approaches to connected learning that are participatory, inclusive, and grounded in community trust. Such an approach also aligns with Collective Action 7 of PCF11’s Gaborone Statement, which speaks to cross-cutting commitments — strengthening the resilience of small and vulnerable states and supporting the skills, knowledge, and systems needed to advance Commonwealth principles.
The 3CL Strategic Plan reflects this spirit of collaboration. It focuses on interoperable systems of learning, supports trustworthy digital identities, and promotes digital literacy as a civic right. 3CL also continues to explore the reflexive relationship between emerging technologies and society, including how tools like AI, blockchain, and open platforms reshape power relations and knowledge access across generations and geographies.
As COL renews its commitment to openness and lifelong learning, it is worth recalling that innovation often flourishes where constraints are greatest. Small states, from Malta to the Maldives, Barbados to Lesotho, offer fertile ground for testing the future of education: agile, connected, and human-centred. The Commonwealth can lead by recognising and amplifying these models, ensuring that scale never limits ambition, and that learning, wherever it happens, remains open, ethical, and transformative.
Looking ahead, 3CL is eager to deepen its collaboration with COL and its Commonwealth and European partners to ensure that small states continue to shape the future of connected learning. The lessons learned in intimate, agile contexts, such as Malta, can illuminate pathways for transforming education systems at any scale.
For more information on the 3CL’s operations, visit www.3CL.org.
This story was originally published in the November 2025 issue of Connections. Access the full issue here.
