| An Interview with Dr Jo Coldwell | |
| (“Inter” refers to the interviewer, “Coldwell” refers to Joe Coldwell) | |
| Inter: | Today I'm with Dr Jo Coldwell of the Faculty of Science and Technology. Thanks for your time, Jo. |
| Coldwell: | You're welcome. |
| Inter: | I think today we decided we were going to talk about your experiences with managing students online. |
| Coldwell: | Yes. |
| Inter: | Especially large groups. Could you tell me a bit of the background and how you've come to be interested in this area? |
| Coldwell: | Okay. When I first joined Deakin some eight years ago I was given the task of running the Computer Ethics and Professional Practice unit off campus mode. It had been run in on-campus mode by my predecessor for a year or two. On investigating what technologies that were available to use and being new to Deakin I did the usual research thing and asked around and I discovered First Class. I thought this would be a very appropriate means of communicating with the off-campus students in this particular unit because I felt that peer discussion was a key aspect of their learning in the unit. Having run the unit on campus in a traditional manner face to face for a couple of years and off-campus with online components utilising First Class and WebCT 3.0 that the school had in-house, I realised that I was actually running two units, more than one, so I decided to start amalgamating them. But rather than doing it the traditional way, sort of trying to move off-campus into on-campus. I did it the other way around and slowly moved on-campus into the off-campus utilising the online components and hence 306 is now a wholly online unit quite by accident. |
| Inter: | But it's a significant unit. |
| Coldwell: | It certainly is. It's a final year unit in the – was then The Bachelor of Computing is now the Bachelor of Information Technology. It's a core unit in all the streams and at the time that I started running it we had something like 40 to 50 on-campus students, about the same number of off-campus students, now I have 500 students. |
| Inter: | And what makes the unit particularly interesting in your experience as well is the length of time which you've been running it in online mode. |
| Coldwell: | Certainly. |
| Inter: | Now, perhaps you can tell us a little bit about …. |
| Coldwell: | Okay. Well, as I mentioned, once I decided I was not going to run two units rather than one I fully integrated them around about 2000 so I've been running it in effectively wholly online mode for about five years. Using different technologies it started out with a combination of WebCT 3.0 and First Class and then it was one of the first units to be implemented in DSO when we first started using DSO in 2003. |
| Inter: | And over that time what had been some of the major design challenges which you've had to face? |
| Coldwell: | I think the trying to present the unit in a form that made sense to the students rather than made sense to me. The way that they view the materials, their tasks, their activities is very different from the way that I look at the programme. I look at the programme as a series of learning activities with associated tasks that have to be completed. The students look at it the other way around. They want to know what the tasks are they have to complete and then what they have to find out to be able to complete those tasks. So, if I organise it in one hierarchy to the students they want it usually upside down. They want to be able to see what are the things that they actually have to do – the tasks first before they find – they work out what it is they need to know. |
| Inter: | How has that experience influenced the current design of 306? |
| Coldwell: | Not that much other than highlighting to the students where their tasks are. I have grave difficulty in thinking in terms of the task and then associated learning materials, objectives, whatever; I like to look at it the other way around. So, I have kept to my philosophical viewpoint on this, but what I have done is conceded to the students' requirements in that they have the things like the assignments separated out as well as being integrated, and the design of the learning activities is such that once they've seen the first activity they can anticipate where things are in every other activity. So, each activity is actually designed using the same template. |
| Inter: | And where to from now? |
| Coldwell: | I don't know. It's all one big experiment. Each semester when I run the unit I survey the students to try and find out what things they liked, what things they didn't like, things that I've tweaked from last semester whether those things have worked or not. And when I come to run it again next year I look at that – the outcomes of that survey and decide what needs to change. As new technologies are introduced into DSO, such as the some of the new functionality that's coming in with Version 3, possibly the synchronous communication tool. If that becomes more reliable in the future I might consider integrating that into the programme. So, at this stage I really couldn't say. All I can say for sure is that it will change. |
| Inter: | I'm sure it will be a very interesting evolution. |
| Coldwell: | It certainly will. For everybody. |
| Inter: | Thanks for your time. |
| Coldwell: | Thank you. |
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