| An Interview with Richard Braithwaite | |
| (“Inter” refers to the interviewer, “Richard” refers to Richard Braithwaite) | |
| Inter: | Today I am with Richard Braithwaite, talking about experiential learning with simulations information systems networks online. Thanks for agreeing to the interview Richard. |
| Richard: | Oh, my pleasure. |
| Inter: | As an Online Teaching and Learning Fellow you obviously have a keen interest in teaching and learning online. Could you share with us your background and interests in this area? |
| Richard: | Okay, I have been using online techniques for a few
years now to supplement my on-campus teaching. For quite a number of years now I have been using a web presence to help disseminate extra materials and to provide a few simulations and activities for students to learn in an experiential manner. When the opportunity arose to turn the unit into a totally online approach I jumped at that opportunity and got into the Fellowship and here we are now after a semester's worth of work. |
| Inter: | Can you tell us a bit about the unit itself, the background to it? |
| Richard: | Okay. Firstly the unit is sometimes perceived as being a technical unit, but I like to see it as essential knowledge, that anyone involved in anything to do with computers should learn. It's all about data communications, about the way computers communicate, and I'm in essence teaching business students about technology, students that don't want to learn technology, so I like to make it as easy for them as possible and as interesting as possible. To demystify it. |
| Inter: | Has the unit been taught online before? |
| Richard: | No, it has run in off-campus mode for quite a few years now, so we did have study guides available to us and in turning it into an online unit what I did is I made a lot of use of the existing study guide materials, but I rewrote them for the online environment. One aspect of that was that I changed the wording and the presentation style from what I see is rather a cold, impersonal approach in study guides to a much more personal, friendly approach in the online environment. I try to make it much more accessible and bridge the gap between the personal approach of being face to face and the online environment where I'm still there behind the online environment, but the students don't necessarily get to see me. That was one of my major concerns, is that the students may perceive online as being a bit cold and clinical as well. I wanted them to keep sticking their hand up and say, look, hey; there really is a person behind what you see on the website. |
| Inter: | And were there any particular ways that you did that? Stuck your hand up. |
| Richard: | Well the very first thing we did was we had a small video and I think this is a very standard approach. Just a little video so they could see me, hear what I sounded like and learn a little bit about the unit. It was just a 30 second video. But probably the big thing to try and personalise it was that we created a character, a cartoon character. This idea actually came from our educational developer in the faculty, Pam Mulready. It was her suggestion to create the character and someone in Learning Services came up with the idea of using an illustrator who had some cartooning background. So we contacted each other by email. He asked for photos of me and based on the photos, he came up with an image that looked a bit like me unfortunately. We created a name of Osi Web, Osi being OSI the Open Systems Interconnect Model which was one of the themes of the unit. So we used a bit of chaining, chaining the concept there into the cartoon and Web naturally from web. So the idea was that every so often this character would pop up and there would be a little bit of humour, a little cartoon strip that featured a concept from the unit but in a comical way. And it acted both as reward for the students and as a way of underscoring the message for them. |
| Inter: | What type of communication did you engage with the students in the unit? |
| Richard: | Okay. Communication with the students was basically through online discussions and that is an area where I do want to improve things in the unit. It's an area I found that there wasn't quite enough feedback from the students. I would pose questions for them in the way points and we will talk about the way points a bit later on, but I would often pose questions for them that were designed to get them to discuss these things with each other online and I wasn't happy with the level of discussion that did take place. So what I found actually is that discussion needs a carrot to encourage them to do it and the carrot is not the fact that they will learn from this, to be realistic I think that all students need some sort of a reward in the form of marks before they'll actually participate. So next year I am going to incorporate some ideas that I have learnt from a few other lecturers that have run online units. I want to have some form of professional journal that has a mark value attached to it, an assessment attached to it and that will involve communicating online. |
| Inter: | You mentioned way points, perhaps you could tell usa little bit more about them. |
| Richard: | Okay. Way points, the basic concept there was
that we were thinking about a student navigating their way through
the unit, through the DSO presence and in navigating, particularly
in aeroplanes, for example, they often have way points and a way
point is a small section of a large journey. It's a point
that you reach and you check that you have reached that particular
part and then you plan to go ahead. So for example flying from
here to Perth there would be a number of way points that the pilot
would reach. We thought same thing in learning styles. They're
navigating through a large unit with lots of concepts and every
so often they need a chance to take stock of where they are, check
their progress and then move ahead again. So it was just a term
I came up with for that. In the way points that I created, some
were multiple choice questions that were done online. Some were
small interactive exercises for experiential learning. Some were
points of discussion and reflection; it was just a variety of
ideas. In essence it's roughly the online equivalent of
a tutorial.
When I designed this unit there were two main things that I kept in mind. One was that I wanted to be able to update the unit at short notice. I didn't want to commit myself to planning a CD Rom months in advance. I want the unit to be organic, such that I can make modifications as technology changes as student needs change, so that meant everything had to be available online. Now following on from that concept I wanted to make it low bandwidth as well. If everything had to be online I wanted everything to be accessible to all students. I had a situation a short while ago in another unit where a student located in outback Queensland took 45 minutes to download a 1 megabyte file. That's the harsh reality of Australia, where some people have poor access to the internet. So in designing this unit, everything was done using html, everything was done using one common style sheet, all the images were done as png files which are fairly low file size and overall the unit consisted of 221 files of which 96 of them were the html. Now those 221 files amounted to 5.8 megabytes overall. Interestingly enough, one file in all of that, the video file, the 30 second clip, if we take that out of it, the rest of comes back to 4.7 megabytes. So you can see that using html for delivery is very bandwidth effective. |
| Inter: | Moving forward, you have told us a little bit about the professional journals that you would like students to keep, maybe you could tell us little bit more about them and any more future directions that you feel that you could take in the information systems. |
| Richard: | Okay, the professional journal idea. I have to thank my colleague Stewart Adam, in marketing for that idea. I'd like to see the way he used it in his unit and borrow more of his ideas, so at this stage it is a bit too early for me to say how I am going to fit that in. It's still an idea, a bit of a dream at the moment. One of the reasons that I chose this unit as an online unit in the first place, is, that I felt that it was one of our units that was more suited than many of the others. A lot of our units involve some form of programming or coding and they normally only work well in a laboratory type of environment. There's a few of our units, those involving systems analysis, and design for example, that might also make the transition into an online environment and I've been talking to my colleagues about my ideas and about how this unit ran last semester and a few other people within the school will be trying some of my concepts, but at this stage there are no plans to make any others totally online. They will operate in a blended environment. They will still use the traditional face to face approach but use DSO as an integral part of their teaching, rather than just in a support role. |
| Inter: | On that subject of fully online units, as a pioneer in that area I guess, would you have anything to share with people who might be considering the route. |
| Richard: | Yes, it is a lot of work to start with. Hopefully you will reap the rewards in the long run because the hard work has been done but one thing I noticed is that there was a bit of a negative reaction from some students at the start. They felt that the idea of being totally online was to reduce costs. They were ignorant of the amount of work that had gone on behind the scenes. They weren't aware of the number of people that had been involved and there were probably a dozen people that were involved in the production of this at some stage. Yeah, we need to overcome that misconception among the students, for us to get totally online education to be successful. |
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