An Interview with Christine Armatas
(“Inter” refers to the interviewer, “Armatas” refers to Christine Armatas)
Inter:	Christine, you’ve had substantial experience in adopting and developing digital media and designing and conducting online teaching, and so I’m quite interested in getting your general reflections on all of these experiences. Perhaps the first question might be; what do you see as some of the key differences between teaching in a predominantly face to face classroom environment compared to teaching in a predominantly online environment?
Armatas:	I think there’s a number of differences between face to face and online and in some ways online gives you additional flexibility to do things more spontaneously and on the fly, than maybe you might have in face to face situations. But then in other ways it really does constrain you. And one of the things that I found challenging was the idea that you have this very permanent record of teaching and teaching materials that needed to be very well organised, very well structured, very accurate, for students to be continually going back and accessing them online. And so that created an additional challenge, I think, to making sure that while you wanted to get flexibility and be able to put things up at short notice to respond to students, et cetera, you needed to make sure that that was absolutely spot on, that you didn’t create confusions or contradict something else that you’d said or that they had in their text book elsewhere. So, I think that was an issue, yep.
Inter:	In terms of that issue, in the work you did in first year psychology it was a blended environment which had the online component, the digital component and the classroom component. But more recently you’ve been working or conducting a wholly online unit in Research Methodology in Psychology. In terms of those issues to do with content and clarity and organisation, did you feel that the ante was really upped in moving from extended online to wholly online?
Armatas:	To some extent yes, although I think if you’re going to shift a unit that one of these mathematically based units is probably not a bad one to move because the – the content is more fixed as opposed to, say, something which might be like, you know, current political issues in Australian politics or something where there might be things that you’re doing and changing on a day to day or week to week basis so a lot of that content stays the same but it’s the teaching around those things that in some ways was laborious because if you’re reproducing equations and things like that online they – they can be difficult to do and if you leave out something or you don’t reproduce a formula correctly, or you make a slip in your calculations it’s – it’s there in perpetuity or until you go back and fix it because 20 students have complained online, you know, that something didn’t work out and you’ve created a whole lot of angst among them. So, that to me, I think, was something that I had to really, sort of, had to deal with, but it’s a bit different to face to face teaching situations.
Inter:	Always had a feeling, Christine, that – that you revelled in the challenge of actually designing, playing with, evolving the wholly online environment. To you it wasn’t a burden. That you almost enjoyed it as much as maybe trying to teach the subject in a face to face situation. How did you feel about it personally?
Armatas:	Look I had some pragmatic issues that I needed to deal with which would probably have motivated me at first to go wholly online and those issues were around catering to the diversity of the group and the on and off campus, and the need to not have a printed study manual. I think that while our study guides have been very good in the past, they really reproduce a textbook type of arrangement. We have a very good text that we use for the course so what was the point of having a reproduction of that or something that was just, you know, just an elaboration. So, the challenge soon for me became, well, how do I supplement a very good text and how do I make use of the media in a way that is going to support student learning and add something above and beyond. So, we really looked at different ways of presenting or structuring the site so that students had more than one learning resource to go for a particular topic. The idea being that, you know, if you get it in five different ways maybe one of those ways is going to gel better than others, and to provide students with variety in their learning as well. So, I really did enjoy that aspect of it and then getting the feedback from the students and seeing how – the sorts of needs that they were articulating and they were giving suggestions about how the site might evolve. So, over the few semesters that the development for this unit happened there were a lot of good tips that came from the students themselves which were able to be incorporated into the site. So, yeah, that was a very rewarding sort of process. You don’t get that in face to face teaching I don’t think. You certainly don’t get the large group. You might be dealing with a tutorial group and a lecture group and the lecture’s much more formal. You don’t get a lot of interaction. And in the tute group you might have more interaction but only, say, with 20 students out of a cohort of 200. So, online you can potentially deal with most of the students that are there enrolled in the unit.
Inter:	So, are you saying almost paradoxically you can create possibly a more personal intimate environment online which gets more students speaking up and contributing compared to a traditional classroom approach of lecturing and tutorial?
Armatas:	Yes, and I think you can get a better overview of what’s going on and what students are thinking than the other situation where you have multiple tutors taking the 20 labs that are run during the week for a particular unit, plus also you get that additional benefit of off-campus students interacting with on-campus students. And I think that’s particularly valuable with respect to shaping students’ learning patterns and encouragement and sharing knowledge, and just that general sort of socialisation that is good in these sorts of units.
Inter:	So, talking about the student learning and the flip side of the coin in terms of the differences in learning in a classroom situation compared to extended or wholly online, do you see differences there and do you see a challenge in regard to – if I’m using the right psychological construct – students being conditioned a certain way in the classroom and then being confronted with a quite dramatically type of learning online in a wholly online unit.
Armatas:	It is interesting in that in the feedback that we have had from students about the unit that a number of students have said that they hated the thought of the technology and studying this unit online, but they had derived an enormous sense of achievement through actually completing the unit and learning something and learning to use the technology and learning the subject material. And the sorts of things that they seem to be challenged by are the – the notions that you have to be self-directed. You have to organise your time. You’re given choice as to what you can look at, should look at, what you do and don’t do as far as material that you cover in the unit. And then there’s that additional challenge of interacting online and how do you actually interact with staff and other students, what you talk about online, to what extent do you expose your weaknesses with respect to various topic/knowledge concepts, et cetera, for everybody else to have a look at. So, I think once students got over some of the organisational things – and they do a lot of discussion amongst themselves to actually put forward ideas about how they actually coped with the unit, how they organised the workload, what they did. We gave them some guidance around the sorts of ways that we thought that they could be working with the material, but they really did support one another in that respect. And then once we got a few of them going online, asking questions, seeking clarification and then pushing the expectation back on the students that they would provide support to one another you’d eventually gather some momentum. And I think that some students found that very frustrating because they had to actually do the work, but for other students it was very liberating for them.
Inter:	So, in terms of the aspiration of wholly online units being about developing self-directed life-long learning skill, there was some evidence starting to accumulate that maybe we are achieving that type of aspiration with your wholly online unit. But it’s not a painless process.
Armatas:	No. And I have said to you before that, you know, fully online was just another way that we developed for traumatising our students. But I think some of them come through the trauma and they grow and others it does nothing for them and they’ve just become very bitter and don’t really get anything out of the experience. But we – we did see some marvellous things on the wholly online unit this semester. We had one student who responded to a posting that I had made in the general discussion area about how to work with the material and I’d given them a little movie that gave them an overview of the course and how it was all structured and he found that helpful. But he said he really wanted to look at the organisation of the web site so he created a site map where he put together all of the learning resources and showed how for him they fitted together. And then this generated a whole lot of discussion from other students about how helpful it was to think of it in this way and how maybe they had thought of it a bit differently and, you know, wonderful technical skills and that this person had. So, I thought that was very interesting. I also thought it was interesting to read postings from students where they talked about, you know, having computer phobias and – et cetera, and really not being very confident, but to actually persisting with the technology and using the technology and learning some skills that were useful in not only that unit but other units. And, of course, one of the things we tried to do for students when we were encouraging them was to say, you know, that this is about new learning skills that can transfer and this is not the only unit and not the only time you’re going to have to engage online. You’re likely to have to do this again later. When you frame it that way for students they tend to be a lot more receptive. And I think also that some of the students were very challenged by the notion that they had to actually organise their learning. And we had quite a bit of discussion about how students typically approach studying, and for a lot of these students it’s about taking notes and re-writing notes from textbooks and study guides and lectures and for this unit that was just not appropriate. And so we were suggesting different strategies and came up with the idea that maybe for this unit you are better off reading the conceptual stuff, attempting the problems which would tell you whether you understood the concepts behind the statistical tests, and if you couldn’t do the problems go back and have a look at where there were gaps in your knowledge, et cetera. And a lot of the students said this is going to be really difficult to do because this is how we do all of our stuff, we write notes but we’ll try it. And then there were lots of postings about, yes, this does work; it helps me manage my time; it’s freed me up; it’s made me feel more motivated and happy with how this unit’s working. So, if for nothing else, some of these students learnt a different way of approaching studying.
Inter:	And, Christine, you mentioned the student doing the site map and we are talking about the wholly unit.
Armatas:	Yep.
Inter:	The Research Methodology in Psychology. Can you explain to us, briefly, what are some of the key components of the wholly online environment that you set up to facilitate learning about the subject?
Armatas:	We had a – an online study guide which was essentially a week by week description of the learning goals and the study resources and the required learning activities, and then there would be a set of optional activities. So, for most topics they would have had to read at least one chapter from a textbook. They would have to attempt some problem sets and they would have to run a statistical package to analyse some data and report on the results. And then there were other various things that they could look at which might be in the form of an audio-visual presentation of a short lecture around a concept; might have been an interactive learning activity that they linked to from the site. So, we tried to provide a variety for them in the sorts of things that they could do while clearly spelling out them what they had to do in order to be able to attempt the assessment for the unit.
Inter:	In terms of the assessment.
Armatas:	Yep.
Inter:	You had a number of online quizzes.
Armatas:	Yes.
Inter:	For different purposes. Would you like to explain them?
Armatas:	For each topic there was an online multiple choice review test and – so, I made a question bank, maybe there was 100 items in there and they would get, you know, 20 of these items selectively so that they could test their knowledge and they could go in and do that as many times as they like and they would get a variety of questions. I also gave them a basic review of mathematics to start with, and that was in response to previous years where we were quite concerned that some of the students coming in didn’t have basic algebraic skills, didn’t understand simple things like using negative numbers, raising things to the power, how to actually work out orders of operation and all of those sorts of things. So, the basic review of maths was a mastery thing that they had to go through and do the tests and then if they couldn’t do these little review tests they were then – then pointed back to another resource. So, that was quite a useful thing to do because, in fact, we brought a lot of students who would not have been up to speed. They wouldn’t have been able to get past the first couple of weeks work because they didn’t have the basic maths skills but once you give them this they’re fine. The other thing that we played with which was not directly for assessment but helped them consolidate their skills was with a programme called Study Mate, and Study Mate allows you to do all sorts of things along the lines of making flash cards so you can either give them a definition and they have to give you the term, or given the term and they have to give you a definition. Matching games; students can actually play against one another in sort of like a game of concentration. The students really liked that. They said that just for basic terms and understanding things like, you know, what is variance, what is homogeneity of variance, what was the T test for independent samples measure. Those sorts of concepts they could really consolidate them just by the – the rote recognition stuff that you get in those. So, we had a few different ways of giving them some feedback about how they were going because they typically didn’t get any until quite late in the course. And given that they’re very anxious about all of this stuff it’s nice to give them some feedback along the way.
Inter:	And you had the online discussions spaces and organised the students into actually quite large tutorial groups. Could you explain how that was done?
Armatas:	Well, I think the online tutes model very much the face to face ones where you might have like a quarter of the classroom who actually speaks during the semester; it was the same thing online. And we also knew that because we were mixing our on and off campus students that it was going to be very difficult to have a week by week structure and so we tried to make that less rigid and so students could actually go in and post questions, and it didn’t matter if you were two weeks in front because you were an off-campus student who had a block of time and you were getting ahead because you knew you weren’t going to be able to get back to it after when your life became complicated. And so they could post questions about stuff that was coming up or stuff that had come behind and then the students could answer, the tutor could answer. And that worked quite well. There were a group of about 50 but it wasn’t a structured discussion area, although it became more structured once they got into doing the laboratory report because there were some more formal things that we needed to communicate to them and talk to them about through their – that online tute area.
Inter:	Now, you – you’ve had a long in researching and evaluating the impacts of the digital and online on student learning, but in regard to the wholly online learning unit what are the types of things you’ve been doing to try and judge the effectiveness or impact of the environment on the students?
Armatas:	We have set up a – a formal research programme, and at the beginning of the semester we gave the – we invited the students to take part in – in this study. So, not all of them will have come on board but we’ve got a reasonable group of students who agreed to complete some questionnaires and then allow us to analyse their audit trails. And I’m interested very much in students’ learning styles and motivations and how that affects what they do when presented with material in a fully online environment. And so we’ve collected some data from the students at the beginning of the semester which is about – loosely about their learning styles and their expectations about what the learning experience should be, and we also measured their level of sort of computer self-efficacy which is, you know, their computer anxiety, how useful they see computers in their lives, et cetera.
Inter:	That seems to be an interesting one, Christine, because a lot of people see the attitudes to computers as being unproblematically good or not an issue at all. And I’m wondering – I think it might be an issue and I think some of your research has shown that it is an issue that we should be quite concerned about.
Armatas:	And there are still a large number of students out there who do not have good computer skills. Well, actually we don’t know that they don’t have good computer skills. They don’t have confidence in their abilities to use computers and I think that’s particularly problematic. We found some very interesting things looking at the first year students that we surveyed a couple of years ago, and we had this group of young students who were, you know, very computer literate but who really had no value or use for studying online compared to an older group of students, mature age, who saw computers as being great but were very anxious about having to study in that way. So, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we don’t see these same sorts of patterns reflected in this group.
Inter:	Do you think overall that the universities moving into e-learning heavily need to be way of the rhetoric of the younger generations coming through being very computer savvy which they might be, but are they computer savvy in regard to actually taking on board serious tertiary education study which is an issue of academic study as opposed to technology for socialisation and entertainment?
Armatas:	I think that that’s – that’s a very important thing that people just sort of gloss over, and that is students’ preparedness to invest time and money in going online for study purposes. I think that students may be – are more motivated to go online to do things like chat and to download music and – and stuff like that. Whether they see online learning in the same way, especially if they’re a traditional on-campus student who wants an on-campus experience with a living, breathing body standing in front of them for, you know, two hours doing the very didactic thing that tends to happen in – in lectures. If they’re an off-campus student they really can see the value. They can see that it provides them with lots and lots of flexibility. I think the other thing is that, certainly, when you explain to students why you’re doing things and why you’ve set things up students are much more amenable. They often don’t think about other people’s perspectives, right. They’re very driven by their own and, you know, I’m an on-campus student so this is how that should happen. But, yes, there’s a whole lot of other people out there who aren’t on-campus, they’re off-campus, they would like to be able to – to, you know, interact and we can set this up and would be good, why don’t we have face to face lectures. Well look, we are providing you with lecture material and we’re – we’re giving you audio-visual presentations from the lecturers, but instead of it being a face to face thing the fact that it’s delivered electronically means that you can go over and over and over it again and you can come in and you can ask questions in your tute group. So, if you explain to students the similarities and the differences and highlight to them what the benefits and what the rationale for the change is then they are a lot more accepting I think.
Inter:	Now, I guess the proof of the pudding, in regard to the quality of any teaching and learning environment including wholly online, is really student performance on the key tasks that have to be completed for their formal assessment. What’s been your experience even this year in regard to the quality of student assignment work being done in the wholly online unit?
Inter:	Yes, they haven’t sat the exam yet so we don’t really know about the – the sort of exam results, but the assignment – the written assignment they had to do which is worth 30 per cent was a fairly major undertaking given that this would be the first time a lot of them would have encountered this type of assessment piece and there are a lot of rules they have to follow regarding APA style, which is the style set down by the psychology discipline for writing reports. They had to actually go out and conduct an experiment, contribute data to a data pool and then they had to analyse that data and write up – write up the results in the appropriate format. They were given a lot of guidance. They were given written notes plus they were given audio-visual presentations on each of the sections which explained what they needed to do. A lot of them complained, up hill and down Dale, and that this was a very, very difficult task and that, you know, it was really far too hard and, you know, why were they being asked to do this. So, we were a little bit cautious when we got the assignments from them and had some trepidation in starting to mark them. But I have to say I have not encountered as many very high quality assignments in the eights years that I‘ve been teaching this unit as I have this particular semester. Now, whether that’s an aberration I’m not sure but these were very, very good reports. They had clearly read and taken on board the stuff that was provided for them in – in the online environment or they hadn’t, and you could just tell the difference between the – the standards of those who looked at the resources and used them; they were very high. So, I think that was a very good thing. It’s a bit like that bitter pill that they have to swallow but it helps them in the long run.
Inter:	Finally, Christine, I guess reflecting on many years of experience in doing this type of work, what do you think is required from the individual academic teacher, school, faculty, university, to actually successfully engage with e-teaching and e-learning?
Armatas:	I think there has to be things happening on several levels. At the level of the individual staff member there has to be a willingness to open yourself up to different ways of teaching. You don’t just take the way you teach face to face and plonk it online; it doesn’t happen that way. And there has to be an appreciation of the capabilities of the technology, how best to use that, how to balance that against the teaching and learning goals that you have. So, there’s a skill set there that’s around the technology and around the teaching and learning practices that the individual staff member has to acquire, and they have to be motivated appropriately to do that. Because I don’t necessarily think it’s an easy thing to do to go online. Then at the sort of the school, faculty, university level I think there really has to be an acknowledgement and a real valuing of what’s happening and the innovation and the pushing the envelope. And I think there’s always going to be that really problematic gap between the rewards people get from good teaching versus the rewards they get for research. And currently in this university the reward structures are very heavily weighted towards research, and I think that if you ask the average academic on the street they firmly believe that the things they should invest their time and effort academically in research related things and not teaching. So, I think until you change that culture you’re only going to get a small number of motivated individuals doing really good stuff but you’re not going to get widespread adoption of this. It will be interesting to see what happens if students eventually start to demand this to say, well, we actually like this and we want this in some format, not necessarily wholly online but we want a – we want a blended environment that’s supported by appropriate online technology. Because then once you get that pressure from the students that will obviously force some people to – to change and rethink.
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