An Interview with John Carmichael
(“Inter” refers to the interviewer, “Carmichael” refers to John Carmichael)
Inter:	John, you must have heard many reasons why students may not want to study a subject like Competition Law and Policy, but there must be very good reasons why they might be interested in this subject. Could you maybe outline some of the benefits of studying this particular unit in the fourth year of a Law program?
Carmichael:	Well I think one of the benefits is that it completes the story of the law of contract that they started right at the beginning of their studies. The law of contract is sort of the building block of our economy in many sorts of ways but unfortunately the doctrine of freedom of contract it was proven had its limits in the sense that powerful parties could sort of basically dominate the terms and trades. And so the theory that the economist Adam Smith had that the market was sort of like a seesaw that tended towards equilibrium it just, things weren't working out that way. And so it was necessary to develop the idea of competition law which was the deliberate evolution of statutes to really make sure that markets remained competitive and that various efficiencies were reintroduced into the market to overcome the problems of the freedom of contract, which ossified into basically an extreme laissez-faire doctrine, which meant that the powerful got more powerful but at the expense of consumers and other market participants.
Inter:	Now this is going to be a very unique experience, studying this unit, because this particular unit in the Law program is a wholly online unit. Now what do we mean by that? I know we mean that students doing this unit will not have classroom, in-person teaching. So you won't be there teaching them in the classroom. What do you think the benefits might be John of doing this unit wholly online?
Carmichael:	Well it is certainly a major change and other people have spoken in terms of the reasons the university has gone this way. I think that whilst a number of students, particularly students who are on campus, are probably fairly apprehensive about going wholly online. There are a number of benefits, particularly for senior Law students as they start to prepare for becoming autonomous professionals, to have this sort of opportunity for guided autonomy and learning styles, particularly in a subject like this, which helps to make them not just legally literate but business literate as well. I think this is a very opportune time to introduce this wholly online unit and it has of course the advantages of flexibility. And with many senior students starting to think of Articles and starting to think of generally preparing themselves for leaving Law School, it gives them some flexibility. Students will probably decide that they wish to come into this subject at various levels. Some of them by now will have well defined ideas of where their career is going and it may be that they are just completing this unit as one more hurdle to leave Law School. Whereas for other students, they will see this unit as absolutely vital to their prospects and their professional identification because they see this as part of the cluster of particular subjects they hope to practice in. I think the advantage of the wholly online unit is that it offers something for everybody. It's possible to come in at a fairly minimalist level and just say, tell me what I have to do to get through and just pass this subject. Whereas we have such an array of resources and different learning styles that people who wish to really pursue the matter deeply are also catered for. So we try to cater for different learning styles and different levels of motivation and expectation and I think that's something that the wholly online environment can do fairly well.
Inter:	Now, no two students are the same and I'm sure there are many eager students listening to this introduction to the unit now, this is not devoid of your teaching expertise and experience or that of your colleagues in designing this wholly online environment. Tell me about the types of typical student motivation and approach you've come across that you're trying to cater for in setting up this type of wholly online teaching and learning environment for this unit.
Carmichael:	Well let me take the easier of what you could call student archetypes first of all, and that is the extremely keen student who is self motivated and self directed. In actual fact they are the ones we have most trouble really as teachers value adding in any way whatsoever because it could well be that they could get through this subject by just taking the very comprehensive casebook and then the study guide and basically studying the subject themselves. And I have a lot of sympathy for such students having been in that position as a Year 12 student where I took one subject entirely on my own because it clashed with another subject in the timetable. So some students have that ability to basically say, tell me what I have to do and I'll go away and do it. And it could be that they only minimally engage in terms of the other materials in the online unit. Another student might say, well look, I really miss lectures. The idea of actually coming into something which is largely text based where the materials are delivered on CD-ROM or on DSO, I really miss the social interaction and the general discipline of going to lectures and so forth. Well, for those students in addition to the extensive text materials we're also providing audio overviews of an hour or so per topic, which are more like the lecture sorts of presentation that they've been used to because people learn things in different ways. Other students perhaps are going to struggle a bit in motivation because they do see this subject as not particularly relevant to their needs. Sure they've chosen to come into a Law School which is commercially focussed and this subject is a very important part of that commercial focus but it could be, for example, they see their career as emerging as, with one student I can think of, an excellent student that I taught early in her course. Her interests were in consumer law and consumer advocacy and she had secured articles with a Christian law firm that was going to work very much at that nitty-gritty end and she saw competition law as very much more a corporate subject. And having been a really good student early in her degree she struggled just to barely pass the subject because she didn't have the motivation other than the sort of negative motivation, it's something I have to do to get my Law degree. Now, we're hoping that by catering for different learning styles, those people will at least find something that they can find engaging and interested in and so forth. So really in a sense what we've tried to do in setting up the materials is to indicate that there are different materials. Some students might access all of the materials and all of the different learning styles, whereas other students might be more selective in terms of those things they find helpful. Some may find the excellent lecture notes that Julie Clarke, the Unit Chair, for example, will be unrolling on DSO week by week, in conjunction with the casebook as totally sufficient. Others may find the sort of the verbal overviews, the audio overviews and so forth as much more motivating for them. They may even download it onto their MP3 players and take it with them while they're out jogging or walking the dog or something like this. So it would be presumptuous of us as we feel our way into this wholly online unit environment ourselves as the teachers to actually feel that we know what any given student is going to find the most appropriate way. So we've actually tried to anticipate and provide for a variety of different learning styles and individual student motivation.
Inter:	Now, I mean, how literally should the students take studying wholly online? If we look at the key media resources, there's still printed material – the printed study guide, the printed casebook. There's material in digital form on CD-ROM and online in DSO. So you've got this sort of wholly aligned to three major media components but is there anything to stop students, John, from actually getting together in person in self-help groups in a particular location to work together in studying this unit? Do they have to study the whole thing, technically, literally, wholly online?
Carmichael:	Oh look, I think it could well be important for many students to actually talk about things together. My understanding is as teachers of this unit, that we don't provide any lecture rooms or for any physical contact. In that sense all students in relating to staff are at the same level, that they sort of relate in a wholly online environment but I include within that of course the possibility of even telephone appointments, for example. But that in terms of peer to peer support and so forth, I think that that's important. We'll also be providing, of course, for student peer to peer electronic support. We will be setting up opportunities in terms of tutorial topics for students to be able to participate in those. One area where the unit team is at the moment is divided as to whether or not we should assess the student participation in electronic or online tutorials. The decision at the moment is that given that no other Law units do have that assessment, we are not going to assess that participation. But we would encourage all students to participate vigorously in the various opportunities for more interactive learning styles that electronic tutorials and chat rooms and so forth will offer. Many of our students of course will be in advance of us in terms of that if they are used to messaging and various other sorts of things, so my hope is that that won't be too much of a hassle. But undoubtedly there will be some students who do miss the idea of the social interaction and the general sort of encouragement that face to face lectures can offer and if they wish to organise supplementary sorts of face to face get togethers with each other that is only to be encouraged, it's just something extra that they can do for themselves.
Inter:	Right, now in terms of these major media resources, I mean, I'm sure I'm like every student who's actually beginning this unit at the moment. I've got my print casebook, I've got my printed study guide, I've got a CD pack in front of me. I know there's an online dimension to the whole environment. If I mention these resources very quickly John, can you just tell me quickly what are their educational purposes? Okay, printed study guide and printed casebook. What am I supposed to do with these resources to learn this subject well?
Carmichael:	Well what those resources do is they give you the basic ingredients. They reflect the issues that Deakin had to deal with in becoming one of this country's most significant distance education providers some time ago. Particularly in Law we've made it clear that anybody, wherever they lived in Australia, or as I've had sometimes a student on a ship somewhere in the Navy, would be able to study off campus and not be disadvantaged. So we had to have some way of giving people a feeling that in their hands they had the comprehensive core materials. And we still continue that tradition even though these days with all sorts of electronic delivery and electronic updates possible it's no longer as essential to be able to at the start of a unit say to somebody, here in this package are the total range of learning materials that you need to do this unit. That is still an important tradition and I think many people still find it very reassuring to know what are the essential or the core materials. And particularly that type of student I was referring to a while ago, that student is very self directed and very autonomous, they could just take the study guide and the casebook and other than checking DSO for the assignment requirements and completing those by the particular times, they could present themselves for the final examination and hopefully do very well because they would have engaged with a lot of personal effort and elbow grease in terms of working their way through the comprehensive casebook and study guide.
Inter:	Okay, I feel as though I'm on very familiar territory with this printed material, this is quite familiar in terms of my experience of studying Law at Deakin, whatever the mode of delivery. I'm starting to open up the CD pack John and I guess as a student I'm looking for additional value, something being done on the CD that maybe I don't quite get in the printed material. Can you maybe explain some of the things which I'll come across on the CD which add that additional learning value for me?
Carmichael:	Yes, well the CD-ROM will include a very short overview, audio explanation of each topic and that audio overview is accompanied by a cartoon which tries to sort of depict with the old adage of a picture being worth a thousand words tries to capture the essence of each particular topic. So already we're getting something that perhaps is quite different from other areas. Now in addition to that, particularly for students whose style might be to learn more by audio or in addition to text, audio, there will be a series then of audio overviews of about an hour or so in length of each of the topics. And they'll be accompanied by speaker's notes in the PowerPoint format, which for any students who wish to check out some particular references and so forth, there will be a number of references to other materials, URL references and things like that. Then, in addition to that, a colleague in Economics is preparing a series of Economics slides which will be a stand alone sort of thing because in the past some students have had trouble coming to grips with the economic issues. And having this particular beginners Economics guide, it will be possible for students at any stage where they feel they need to refresh some of the concepts which will have been dealt with in the legal context, they will be able to go to these slides and remind themselves of some of the underlying economics aspects. So I guess what I'd say the approach of the CD-ROM is is to really try and make available a number of different materials that some students will really appreciate, whereas others might feel perhaps they use them a little bit but don't use them very much at all. All one can really say in this whole online exercise is that our approach has been something like the professional golfer who carries around 14 clubs in his or her golf bag. It may be in any given round they don't use all of those clubs as much as others and that some clubs are going to be used in a much more guaranteed way, perhaps. And that might be the analogy with the casebook and the study guide – they might be like the driver and the putter in golf. Now, I better not pursue the golf analogy too much because as a tennis player I don't know much about golf but I think this is the sort of, the general approach that we've tried to do in the CD-ROM, is to really try and anticipate as far as we can as many different learning styles as possible. We've tried to also capture some recent sort of important discussion on television, for example, of some of the major changes that have been made recently to the Trade Practices Act, either in terms of legislation or in terms of methods of enforcement through the ACCC so that we can give a sort of a contemporary feel and a multimedia feel to the whole area so that students have a much greater range of potential strategies that they can follow and a range of materials that they can use to enrich their study of this important subject.
Inter:	Now John, I'm always looking for value and you're going to take me online, literally online. Where is the additional value for me there as a student? I mean, I want to go online and I want it to be fairly compelling. Now, this Fireside Chat is an interesting concept. What's that all about and how is that going to give me some kind of new learning value I won't get on the CD-ROM?
Carmichael:	Alright, the Fireside chats, which will be on DSO, the theory behind these is that these will be short, 10 to 15 minute audio streamed updates week by week, which will cover both any changes or updates in the particular topic but also addressing in hopefully a fairly conversational way any sorts of issues or concerns that individual students may have emailed us or left us a message on DSO about. We know that for each enquiry we receive very often there are other people who are thinking about this as well. So the idea of these Fireside chats is to try and put people in touch in a fairly sort of direct way. The term itself was used by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt where he spoke to the nation during the dark days of the Second World War to tell them what was happening, to show that he recognised that people were worried and what was being done about things. So in a sense this is an attempt to …
Inter:	So there will be dark days of wholly online learning do you think, John, in this subject?
Carmichael:	Hopefully not too many and one of the things of Fireside Chat is that students will have the chance to set the agenda. If there's anything [and it's particular], they say, well look, this little thing hasn't really been clear. Would you mind spending a few minutes clarifying this particular matter or that matter? In this way students can help set the agenda of what's covered in future Fireside chats. The other function of the Fireside chats is that the idea is that they will only be available for a couple of weeks and then they will be taken off. So the Fireside chats are being used to give students an idea that time is passing, because one of the things that can happen if a student is studying other units conventionally and one unit wholly online is that there can be a tendency to leave the wholly online unit for some time in the future when there's a bit of spare time, to go to your lectures and all the other things for your other subjects and to do your part-time job and so forth and keep saying, 'I'm going to get around to that wholly online unit eventually'. Now the idea of the Fireside chats will be to say, well, look, by now you should have done this and you will have noticed X and be up to date with Y and to really try and engage in a shepherding function to keep people on track so that they don't really get too far behind, because I think that is one of the potential dangers in a wholly online unit that we have to guard against. I have detailed knowledge of this at the moment where I have one student that I'm teaching Legal Studies to in Year 11 who is doing a distance education Legal Studies unit because his school doesn't teach Legal Studies. And I know that this particular student, who is my son, tends to let a few weeks go by when he doesn't do anything and I have to say to him, these holidays, right, you've got three units you must do in these holidays to really catch up because you've been too busy keeping up with your classes. And I think this is something we have to be very aware of as teachers in the wholly online environment that we must encourage students to participate as much and to keep as up to date as much in the online environment because otherwise it could lead to surface learning, just skimming over and doing the bare minimum and doing it in a hurry towards the exams rather than keeping up with the subject in a systematic way.
Inter:	John, name me, I'm any student, any student you want to find is going to say to you John, show me the money. What's the formal assessment? Marks and grades. What do I have to do formally to demonstrate my expertise in this subject to do well at it?
Carmichael:	Well the requirement in that sense, much of the assessment at the moment remains the assessment which takes place within the context of the Law School and that essentially is an examination worth 60% of the marks and two interim assignments: one a much shorter and early assignment worth 10% of the marks and then a later assignment worth 30% of the marks, a more traditional form of in depth essay. So there are three assessment tasks and this is why perhaps the staff teaching the unit at the moment are a little bit divided, that one member of that teaching team is of the view that we really should make some provision for assessing the tutorials because students are entitled to say, well, show me the marks and that's where I'll put my effort. Why should I put effort into tutorials? All I can say at the moment is that we hope that the people will find the tutorials a good way of increasing learning. The examination generally speaking, for those students who are well prepared is actually a refreshing opportunity to display their knowledge. But for any student who perhaps is over engaged in surface learning or, if you like, cramming styles towards the end and just focussed on the assignments, then they may be struggling because sometimes the examination presupposes the assignment so there may not be necessarily a question on that particular assignment. It may be if we've set an assignment on, say, Section 46 – misuse of market power provision, that may not be one of the options in the examination. So it will be necessary for students of course to reasonably cover the whole field. And covering the field is an important term in constitutional law but it's also important in terms of student strategies. And that's why perhaps I'm, perhaps a little preachily, emphasising the importance of students not regarding the wholly online environment as one where they can just hone in on just a couple of assessment tasks and come along to an exam hoping for the best.
Inter:	So you will organise the students into electronic tutorial groups.
Carmichael:	Electronic tutorial groups.
Inter:	They can go out by themselves and initiate their own self help tutorial groups and meet in-person, face to face, that's their business, their initiative that they can show.
Carmichael:	That's right, yes.
Inter:	You're really saying to them, look, I allocate you to an e-tutorial, getting active in that tutorial, get active week by week.
Carmichael:	Yes.
Inter:	It will help you do any assignments and preparing for the exam. You mentioned the Fireside Chat. Are you going to do things to particularly help the students in preparing for that exam in the final part of the semester online?
Carmichael:	Well that's an interesting thing. I think at the moment that seems so far down the track in terms of what we've been doing. I know as a face to face teacher I had always said to students that if anybody wanted to give me a practice examination question I would have a look at that and I would imagine that we will certainly encourage some optional activities along those lines. And we will also, my hope is that we will at some stage be in a position to be able to actually look at some good student answers given in exam questions. There are copyright questions to sort out with that but this is something I used to do in Adelaide many years ago with looking at good student answers written in exam questions and then some sort of commentary on that. So as we come towards the examinations we will, just as we do in the conventional teaching, we'll be looking at ways of coaching. Increasingly as you get to the exam you cease to think less of your educator's role and more of the coaching role, before you then become the judge assessing the student's performance. So we'll be doing everything possible to encourage students. But to some extent wholly online units are a bit like my experience with the conscription period in Australian history. It was possible to either sort of try to opt out as much as possible and bemoan the fates and say, why do I have to do this, or it was possible to take a reasonably positive view and say, well how can I best learn something here and slot into things so that I take some experience out of it. Now I think those students who are sufficiently positive to give it a go will take a lot out of it and should emerge as much more confident about their abilities to be successful lifelong learners and autonomous professionals within the legal profession and the related business professions in which many of our students go to. So I think that the online unit has a lot to offer, but I do understand that some people might find it disconcerting at first.
Inter:	In stepping back John and finally summarising maybe some of the key advice you could give on study strategies to learn effectively in this type of environment, let's try and go through a few. I mean, is this environment so different to the normal face to face teaching environment for those students studying on campus? I mean, they need to be well organised, they need to begin at week one, they need to engage with and look at all the relevant resources, they need to be attuned to the formal assessment requirements. I mean, are these things radically different just because this is a wholly online unit?
Carmichael:	They don't need to be radically different but one of the things that people may find different is just that they don't have classes. Now I personally see this as liberating. I've been involved in what I call flexible teaching now for 30 or 40 years and I at times am concerned about the tyranny of the timetable. If you're not a morning person and the timetable says you must attend a lecture from eight o'clock to ten o'clock or something, a two hour lecture, well that can be quite disastrous. Whereas I think that in that sense there are a lot of positives and scope for students to actually follow and develop their own learning styles and at their own time, pace and place and things like that. But I think having those choices may be radically different for all students that sometimes complain, 'oh, I've got a bloody boring lecture to go to', There is a certain sort of ritual that people have become used to in terms of turning up, both at school and then at university and sort of particular times and things. So any student who's never studied an online unit before may have some sorts of qualms in that regard. But I think we also have to understand that by now what, previously with First Class and now with DSO, students have already participated in many units which have had substantial online components, so I think in some ways this is only in some cases a shift of emphasis rather than a total – what's it called in the jargon – a paradigm shift. This is not some totally new way of doing things. And we've all, at least if not in formal academic subjects, had experience of learning information for ourselves anyway. So in a sense this is really not just applying new sorts of skills but perhaps being a bit more consciously self disciplined about getting on with the learning you need to do and making sure that you give as much allocation to this particular subject as you do to the other subjects that you may still be studying in more conventional sorts of ways.
Inter:	And John I take it you're going to be keen to hear back from students on their experiences of doing the unit. They get an opportunity to fill out the university online student evaluation survey but, I think in terms of DSO there can be a feedback discussion board. But I take it overall you and the team are really keen to hear, week by week, how students are actually experiencing the unit and coping and doing well in this kind of environment.
Carmichael:	Absolutely, I think more than usually. This unit at least for this year, is a pioneering unit and that it would be only fair to say that the staff were apprehensive in some ways. We've been asked to take this on board and we've taken it on good faith. We understand the overall Deakin strategy, that Deakin wants to position itself and to equip its graduates for the world of lifelong learning and I think, personally I endorse the Vice-Chancellor's approach in that regard very strongly. But in actually implementing that vision in a particular subject, it is fraught with difficulty. We're interested in knowing those things that students value and other things which perhaps they don't feel are as valuable. I for a start, as the person doing the Fireside chats, I would be able to find other ways to fill up my time. And if it should turn out that – for any given 15 minute Fireside Chat it probably takes me a couple of hours of preparation, thinking, recording and so forth – I would be quite willing to be told in that sense that if the Fireside chats are not helpful, and that's something we may drop in future years, and similarly with the other initiatives and so forth. It may be that some people disagree, for example, with the idea that we should have cartoons in a serious subject like competition law and they may think this is a bit in for a dig. It may be that they don't feel that the Economics site is all that helpful or whatever. So there are different things which are going to appeal or not appeal to various people but if we start to get a fairly uniform sense of commentary that some particular features either are not helpful or need to be improved in certain directions, well obviously we want that feedback. Any teacher wants feedback all the time, just as students do, but I think that feedback is more vital this year because the students in this particular first offering of this online unit are fellow learners with us in terms of helping to sort of clarify future directions for students who come into this unit in the years ahead.
Inter:	John you've been an online teaching and learning Fellow in 2004. Not every academic teaching staff member at Deakin gets to become a Fellow but – and I know you actually pursued a particular journey during that year in reflecting on the best way of actually designing and operating this type of environment, but how important do you think a collaged approach is when it really comes to thinking innovatively, differently about designing and operating a different type of teaching and learning environment, even if you can't be a Fellow?
Carmichael:	Yes, well certainly in terms of the Fellowship itself, I found it quite a revelation. Being a part-time member of staff, in my first years here at Deakin I'd more or less got into my particular slot and really only known people in the Law School so I found that discovering the wider sense of support and the abilities of many people and being able to talk about matters in relation to the online, being able to confess quite openly our own insecurities as to how we were going to go, getting ideas from other people, sometimes being able to offer an idea or personal experience, I found that whole sharing very refreshing. It perhaps is one of the downsides of the important emphasis on staff being active in research that we don't talk and think enough about our teaching generally, particularly within our own schools, although we're trying to do a little bit more of that in the Law School. And I just found for the first half or so of the online teaching Fellowship it was wonderful just to be able to look around and explore the options to get involved in a couple of trial projects such as a small CD project I did for our Business Law subject and so forth. It also personally encouraged me to think much more consciously about a number of educational matters and I was lucky enough to develop up an article which got into a leading legal education journal and so forth. So I think the whole energising effect of the Fellowship and the opportunity to meet with so many people, I found it a richly rewarding experience. I don't want to talk it up too much because I gather the university has decided not to continue them but I would hope that in our own individual schools we can hope of finding and exploring ways to enthuse staff. But within our own schools we don't necessarily interact with the wider university and one of the great discoveries and reassurances for me in the wholly online unit is that we are having the support of so many wonderful colleagues, particularly in teaching, learning and the various multimedia services and so forth, sorts of enrichment that are not possible for one stand alone teacher face to face who can barely perhaps manage PowerPoints or something like that. To have all this extra support I think is something which hopefully will flow through to the students so that they may well find these wholly online units a very enriching experience. And certainly I've found the whole experience of being an Online Teaching and Learning Fellow, given that I had a lot of qualms initially about getting involved in this area, I've found it very sustaining and very helpful and as I say, it's just a pity that there may not be these same opportunities for other staff to be able to have that wider degree of exposure and involvement.
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