An Interview with Malcom Campbell
(“Int” refers to the interviewer, “MC” refers to Malcolm Campbell)
Int:	Malcolm, I'm interested in the aims of the strategic academic unit in the context of the graduate certificate in higher education. I wonder whether you might be able to outline the purposes of that particular unit, what you were trying to achieve.
MC:	The aims are a little bit different I guess to the other units that sit within the graduate certificate. In this particular unit, our aim is to address how an academic works and thinks in the workplace rather than focusing on what happens in a classroom. So in this particular unit, the goal is about understanding what the university environment is about nationally and locally, internationally, and then to understand how leadership works within the university, what personal leadership is about and then how you implement those kinds of activities within an academic environment.
Int:	So you mentioned a number of key topics, which are dealt with in the unit. Can you tell me a little more about how you actually conceived the content, the organisation of the content for the unit?
MC:	I guess the conception of the topic is pretty much laid out in a structure of the unit. We started with this concept called 'being strategic'. What does being strategic mean in an academic environment and that actually is the first topic that is dealt with in the structure of the course. So being strategic is about understanding yourself, it's about understanding the environment that the university sits within, it's about understanding how people communicate at a strategic level within the university.
Int:	Now presumably like all good students, the participants in the unit would have been very interested in the formal assessment requirements. What did you actually want them to do with the topics and content of the unit in their formal assignment work?
MC:	The assignment was based around our conception of what the goals of the unit were in terms of addressing the needs of each individual. So the assessment starts off with a personal evaluation we called a personal plan if you like, similar to what happens in the PPR process but more of a self understanding exercise: what are your goals as an academic, what do you understand being an academic is about, aspects along that line, so participants in the unit will then formulate a personal plan that can be taken forward to any activity within the university, can form the base of PPR, can form the basis of applications for promotion, so it could be used in a variety of circumstances so there is an assessment component that is really about providing feedback to the participants about how we view their personal evaluation. And then they can take that feedback and re-use the document for a number of activities later on down the track.
Int:	Now you put together a number of video, digital materials or video interviews and conversations: What sort of reasoning was behind that kind of video resource as part of the unit package and environment?
MC:	One is we thought that the unit is pretty dry. Every time we sent the course material to readers for review, the concept about… well this will be a boring unit won't it, in the sense of the participants just reading this or looking at the policy documents or trying to find their way through The Guide. So we put together a range of people to discuss a variety of topics-that perhaps participants wouldn't normally come in contact with in day-to-day activity. Members of the senior executives and the senior faculty representatives are not people that new academics would normally come into contact on a day-to-day basis. So one aspect was to draw in to the unit images of these people and discussions with these people so that the participants can hear what the leaders of the university say on a first hand basis, as though they are actually participating in the interview themselves. The other aspect is just to get a broad picture of what the local environment is about. In the future, we plan to extend the video clips into a broader sector of the university not just senior management but we need to draw into the unit some of the thinking, the planning, the goals and visions of the senior management and it's very difficult to do that just by sending people off to strategic plans and operational plans. Hearing it I think is much better sometimes.
Int:	I think I'd agree, and you know being a joint chair, but in addition Malcolm, you brought your own considerable information technology design and build skills to actually creating the online environment working in DSO. Can you give us some insight into how you conceptualised the site and went about building it?
MC:	Well we had the structure; I think to build a website you need to have the architecture of the unit in place. And that doesn't matter how you're going to present the unit, whether it's classroom activities, whether it's a DSO site, whether it's a Study Guide, you still need to have the architecture of the unit in place. So we had that in place quite early and then we could move in particular directions. When you talk to people they say 'I hate reading things online', they like to have things in paper format, so we wanted to move as much as we could away from the reading online to auditory material, visual material and to get as much interaction as we can. Now there's not a great deal of interaction, I guess that's future projects down the track is to try and improve the interaction within the site but people have to… it's all about engagement and this is one idea that we had that might engage participants. I'm not sure how successful though, I'd be interested to see what some of the feedback is.
Int:	I was going to ask you that question about how you think participants have engaged with environment but it's very visually, I mean relative to other DSO sites, visually uplifting and you know there is some very interesting hypertext linking to try and glue the different topics together and different spaces in DSO. Could you give us a little more insight into why the visual presentation and how you thought about the value of hypertext linking the things together?
MC:	That's a bit difficult because its sort of, its like asking Van Gogh why he painted a painting in a particular way, or you know, some of that's very internal to me. I find it very difficult to verbalise some of those thought patterns, it's all about design and conceptualisation and its some of the things that I have to try and teach to my students the ones that I teach in IT, so I guess I bring in some of the principles of graphic design, human computer interaction which are my research areas. So I guess hopefully I wouldn't like to have a failure on my hands in terms of being able to put theory into practice so I guess one of the aspects is trying to put my own theory into practice. The other aspect is just standing back and this is me as a teacher rather than anything else, it's what I tell my design students as well. You have to stand back and be able to put yourself in the place of the learner. So one of the things that I do is I finish a particular design, I stand back and look at it as a learner, how would I approach this as a learner and is it something that I could navigate as a learner devoid of whatever fundamental knowledge I might have about graphic design. And that's very difficult to teach somebody how to do. It's the stumbling block for most of my students, as well as being able to do that standing back process. But if you think that the overall concept of the website is good and useful, then I guess I've been successful in that standing back process.
Int:	Malcolm in terms of the lessons learnt I guess in regard to working discussion spaces, that interactive communicative dimension of these environments, what could you pass on the people in regard to the ways you structured them and you worked them and you moderate them, I mean it seems challenging and hard work to get people to really communicate in a higher level intellectually online. What's your feeling there?
MC:	I have to be honest and say that that's my weakness as an online teacher. Most of that moderation process was done by Julia, who is my partner in crime in this particular unit. So she bore the brunt of that kind of activity. But our goal was to start or to stimulate the discussion. So in terms of online discussions, you have to have some stimulus to get people started. Some people use assessment as one of those stimuli, you know you have to participate because you are going to get marks for it. The other side of the story is that you participate because you want to, because you've engaged in the material. That was the approach we decided to take and it took more effort than what we thought to get that stimulation of the discussion group going. But I think it worked towards the end because the participants recognised that it contributed to their own learning, that they needed to get the feedback from other people so that they could improve the product that they were producing which was their personal plan. So the discussion groups certainly escalated as the semester went on, but there were no marks associated with it. Now whether we bring marks back into it at another stage to get that stimulus going early is something that we have to address as a unit team. It may be something we do or it may not be.
Int:	I guess finally Malcolm reflecting on this unit and the grade cert being effectively online but even beyond in terms of your teaching of IT, where would you like to go or ideally, what types of technologically mediated environments would you like to create and run that would really enhance learning at the tertiary level, sort of a crystal ball gazing type question.
MC:	In general or in teaching graduate certificate?
Int:	Yeah you might reflect on this unit of a grade cert.
MC:	I think they're a little bit different. In teaching undergraduate, I think where I want to head is more interactivity, particularly in self assessment, being able to engage in the learning process and manipulate the knowledge in the way that each individual student needs it, so that you can grab the bits that you know you need and work with other bits that perhaps are already known. Does that work in the graduate certificate environment? It probably does but there's probably less of a need for that feedback loop. I think the participants need more feedback from experienced staff and I think the engagement in the discussion groups, particularly when we had some of the senior management come online and actually be moderators in the discussion group, and I think that was a good feedback loop for the participants in that environment because that's what they were looking for. They wanted to know if their ideas were fitting in the general framework of being strategic in a university environment. Self assessment wasn't really part of the process because we were not assessing knowledge per say. We were assessing the way that people thought about knowledge and re packaged it. So it varies, but for me as an IT specialist working in learning, then engagement in the environment is where I want to head in the future.
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