An Interview with Carolyn Doyle and Sandra Pyke about teaching and learning skills for law students
(“Int” refers to the interviewer, “Car” refers to Carolyn and “San” refers to Sandra)
Int:	I would just like to ask Carolyn to introduce the unit and the team and the overall background of the unit.
Car:	This unit was first introduced in 2001, which was the year I first arrived here at Deakin. It had been developed the year before by a team which included Sandra. The aim of the unit is to provide a foundation for the first year students coming into the course, to provide them with an introduction to certain skills that they are going to need throughout their studies in law but also in practice, and also to introduce them to the nature of the Australian Legal System and its history and also to the Common Law method and Statutory interpretation. Which again, are things that they are going to need in order to successfully study discrete areas of law later on in their course. The teaching team, there are lecturers at each campus, Burwood and Geelong. We also have tutors in this unit. There are weekly tutes as well as four hours of lectures. We also have the librarians who are part of the teaching team in this unit. The legal research topic, the teaching in that topic is done by the librarians. In fact Sandra, on the Burwood campus, and Alison and Helen at Geelong.
Int:	Sandra, the role of the law librarian for the Faculty of Business and Law, what is that role?
San:	The role of the law librarian is to assist the staff and students of the law school, as a primary user group, in their research and their teaching. That means that I develop a collection of legal materials, both paper and online. I instruct people on how to use those materials and I am just generally a resource person for the staff and students in their research. But the introduction of the Law Society and Civil Rights Unit has added another string to my bow in that when they are lecturing to the students on how to become efficient and effective legal researchers.
Int:	Could you perhaps describe your philosophy of teaching and learning, and how have those views been shaped?
Car:	I think to take the second question first, my philosophy is being shaped by my experience of teaching, particularly first year students. Because I teach not only this unit, this foundation unit, but also a second semester unit for first years. What I focus on is that I have to introduce the students to a completely new world of thinking, of ways for approaching problems. My aim is to make them feel comfortable and not threatened so that they are relaxed enough to develop the confidence to go into this new world. I think respect is the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of my philosophy because I think it is very important to convey to students that respect and also that it is a two way process between teachers and students and also amongst the students. That is one part of it. The other part I think is trying to enthuse the students and trying to show them that law and legal studies is something that can be extremely interesting. Intellectually challenging and also very relevant to all aspects of life in society. Those are the things that I try to do. Also to make them take intellectual things seriously and to realise that these things have to be approached in a serious way with regard… if they are going to become good lawyers.
Int:	That is quite a challenge, particularly with distributed students.
Car:	It is. I should have said earlier when I was talking about cohorts, I should have said also we have a large online contingent or a wholly online off campus cohort of students and they present particular challenges for us. It was in large, part with them in mind also, that we developed our research teaching the way that we have.
Int:	That's going back to the introduction of DSO. You have been teaching online and face to face in this unit for quite a number of years, but your whole approach with the introduction of DSO somewhat changed and Sandra, you could perhaps reflect on what DSO offered to this unit.
San:	DSO is a really vital part for imparting legal research skills to the cohort within the unit, especially the off campus students. We have always had off campus students in the law school, but prior to the online take-off or the tremendous way that lawyers have been using the internet to mount legal information, it was very, very hard to impart skills to off campus students. They had to come to a library to use the tools to get the skills. And if you are living in Kalgoorlie or some place like that, it is a very long way to the nearest law library. The other thing that we had tried to do before using DSO was to purchase a textbook off the shelf and to get the students to work through the material that was in a textbook. It was somewhat successful but the amount of time that I had to spend Deakinising the textbook, I may as well have written one myself and indeed we did decide that we could do better than the one off the shelf, and that is what prompted us to put one online. Also just knowing that with the online delivery, the students can be reading our module, can be in the database that they need to be using and constantly comparing between our module and what they see on the database to learn how to access, how to search, and when they get information, what bits they should be looking at to ensure that they are using good law.
Int:	So you redeveloped the study guide completely?
San:	Absolutely.
Int:	So you threw out the textbook, redeveloped it from scratch and constructed it in an online environment?
San:	The first year that we did it on our own reconstruction was the final year of First Class. Its first incarnation was as a group of documents within First Class. But they were static word documents, they had no interactivity and we found that, as many people do, just to take a document and put it online and say “it's on online” is just not appropriate. You have to write for the online environment. After that First Class experience, we realised that there are a number of different possibilities that can happen with a truly online thing like DSO. We revamped our totally new product one more time to get it onto DSO.
Int:	That leads me to my next question about the issues that you need to address when developing online research skills.
San:	The issues that we need to address are to make sure that the students choose the correct place to go to when they are researching things and that they know how to access the information and they understand what it is that they are seeing online. The thing is that there are so many different places that you can access some of this information. We really have to teach students to be quite analytical in where they are going. We have to show them by example what can and can't work with various different databases. There are a number of different issues that we have to alert them to.
Int:	And how do you go about doing that?
San:	It is mainly through a trial and error situation. We show them the best way to go through something and then we would say to them that this is a better approach than trying X, Y, Z because this database does all of these various bits and pieces. It is quite long. If you take it out and print it out, there is over 20,000 words in that research module. It is very descriptive and it goes through a lot of examples and there are a lot of screen captures and things just to alert people to where they need to be looking.
Int:	What DSO did offer was interactivity and within this unit there is a lot of embedded self tests. I am interested to know what impact these may have had on learning. What impact it had on the students' learning experiences and the type of feedback you might have got from the use of online learning in this way?
San:	I was very keen to use the self tests, A, because they existed and I think people do like to test themselves against a bank of questions that are up there. But also because the 10% component of the marks, I felt that the more practice that we can give students before they attempt the assessable section, the better it is. Also the off campus students really benefit from being able to do these self tests because they don't come in, they can't ring the buzzers in the library to talk to law staff. They need to be able to have as many possible options as they can. We have two ways of self testing. We get them to do a worksheet, which also has answers on it as they go through, then at the end of a section we ask them to do a self test. The response has been terrific. Students really enjoy the self tests.
Int:	Carolyn, do you find that the self tests are contributed to the learning environment in other ways? Perhaps for increased discussion in the classroom and online?
Car:	It does not seem to have spilled over into the classroom. I guess the legal research topic does operate as a discrete topic that they do and the academic staff do not really address those issues. But I think it has a positive spill over effect in that the feedback we have gotten is really positive. They enjoy it and they are encouraged by being able to master these skills and being able to see that they have mastered them by doing the self tests. It has a positive effect on the students' attitude overall. Particularly the off campus students, who can often become alienated if they feel isolated or frustrated because they do not know what is expected of them, or they do not feel that they have got adequate opportunities to test their knowledge and understanding. That is not a problem with this particular part of this unit. The way the module has been constructed has really very effectively addressed that. It just seems to have been a very positive aspect of the unit and it sets up the students for a positive attitude.
San:	Yes, I think that is true and I am certainly seeing more confident students and also I am seeing far more of them in the library accessing online materials, which I know sounds a bit strange, they'll be standing next to the books but using the online versions of the same things. But many years ago, I would not have seen the students interacting with the materials in the same way. I am positive that is because of the module.
Int:	I know that, in many other units, staff despair at the lack of engagement students have with the online journals and electronic material in particular. I have a rather naive question here, but how do you encourage students to use the online databases?
San:	We don't actually encourage them, we make them. To finish the module they have to use a number of different databases and the test questions that they are going to get in the actual assessed test, are all prefaced by access to LexisNexis to find X, Y, Z or using Westlaw International to find X, Y, Z. So if they don't use the online databases, there's 10% of their marks, right out the window.
Car:	I think the other thing is, law is perhaps a little bit different from some other disciplines in that there is really no alternative. The online resources are far superior than the paper alternatives for things that they are going to have to use. Like looking up legislation. It is not optional in law to look up cases and legislation. You have to do it and it is just easier to do it online. From that point of view it is not hard to get them to go online. The challenge is to get them to use the best source and not to just rely on a Google or another search engine like that, but to go the best source for what they are looking for.
San:	And that is what we try to teach them. To be discriminating in their choice. The ideal of the module is if I was looking for cases or legislation on a particular topic, I would always go to Anstat for Victorian Legislation because I know it is up to date, the official supplier, all of these bits and pieces.
Car	I think that is the other thing that is so important for law students and this is the other great advantage of online, you don't have a problem getting them online, is that law changes so fast, that they must go to the most up to date source.
San:	They can be in real trouble if they don't.
Car:	Yes, they can get an old version of a piece of legislation or if they are searching amongst paper and they don't know what they are doing, they could easily look up an Act that has been repealed, or they won't get the latest cases on whatever topic it is.
Int:	Be aware of the subsequent judicial considerations on the cases, which may make a huge impact on what they are trying to write about.
Car:	And the introduction of online resources in law has meant that there is no excuse for lawyers being out of date, or missing something. There is no excuse and therefore they need to learn that. Because in practice, no one is going to forgive them for getting the wrong version of an Act. Online offers the capacity to be just about as up to date as you can possibly be and they must learn how to use those things to survive as lawyers in practice.
Int:	Your experiences now with Deakin Studies Online, what have you learnt about designing and constructing content and working effectively online and obviously you have done so well in drawing all those resources into the environment, so please reflect on…
San:	I think one of the important things that we did, once we decided to take the files from First Class and put them into a DSO environment, was that we sat down and thought really, really hard about the architecture of the whole module. How are the students going to navigate through this, because it is long and fairly complex. What pathway will we get them to take? How will the documents and the files themselves integrate and interrelate with each other? We sat down and we must have talked about that for quite some time. What is it going to look like at the end? How is it all going to fit together? So before we wrote a word or edited a word, we sat down and thought about the structure of what we wanted to do. Then we realised that just putting a document onto an online thing can make it very flat and uninteresting. We had to do a lot of editing work to make sure that it was a bit more vibrant, a bit more catchy than merely just reading something flat off the page. The other thing that we were really excited about was the fact that we could link straight out to websites. We had to develop all those links and work out what we wanted, where we wanted the links to point to and all the rest of those sort of technical type issues. What I have learnt is that it takes a long, long time to do this. We thought we would knock it over in a semester and towards the end we were really running to get it online in time. The other thing which happened, which I think was just initial DSO teething problems, was that we had a lot of trouble loading our files, which were quite large. That was a little bit scary I guess in that I was just a bit concerned about what the technical capacity of DSO was. The students themselves loved the DSO experience, but we did have a problem in the sense that the submission of the online assignment did not go as we would have wished. We think we have got that covered now, but that was an experience where I felt the technology lagged behind our expectations of it.
Car:	In fact, wasn't it the case that you designed the test to by done online, and because of difficulties or feedback about the self tests not working as they should have, we decided not to take the chance on that and instructed the students to download the test and hand it in.
San:	So DSO in a way had some teething problems which were unfortunate but I can see that, if they would only work, it would be absolutely terrific. Overall, a very positive thing and just a matter of never underestimate the time it is going to take you to turn something into a worthwhile online resource.
Int:	How many people were involved in the development of that, the resource skills component?
San:	Myself, and there is a job share position at Geelong between two librarians, Alison Pascall and Helen Wood, and we would meet and just work on that at least every week and spend a day really working on it and trying to make sure that we had our theory right. Then we would go away and write. They would write certain sections, I would write certain sections. We would test them out and see how they go then get together with more collaborative work.
Int:	Well it is a great product. So it worked well.
Car:	And we seem to have overcome many of the teething problems, fortunately that we had with the first few months of DSO.
Int:	Overall, Carolyn in particular, how would you like to further develop your teaching and learning materials or teaching and learning environments more pervasively in the future?
Car:	I think it would be great if we could use the interactivity and the other features of DSO more effectively. Not only in that particular part of the unit but also overall, to give the, particularly, off campus students a better experience. The difficulties, are just what Sandra said, the time involved in doing that. You would need to have someone working on it full time for a year, I think. To do what she has done with this, the one part of it, for the whole unit. That is what I see as a difficulty in doing it. I think there is no doubt that you could offer a much better learning experience, particularly for the off campus students by making better use of what DSO can do than we currently do. At the moment, apart from that research module, what we do is we load up the resources that we offer to the on campus students, we load them up as word documents or PDF documents and that is it. That is certainly not optimum use of DSO. But the difficulty is as Sandra said, if you are going to do it, you have to do it properly. You have to sit down, you have to have a philosophy first of all, then you have to work out how you are going to design this thing so it will work.
San:	You have to have objectives. You have to clear objectives as to what it is this unit or this module is going to achieve and if you haven't got those very clear in your mind, you can get lost.
Car:	I feel quite strongly about the fact that we have a large contingent of off campus students. That we have a resource that we could use to enhance their experiences and as you know at the moment, we are not making as much use of it as we could. It is just a question of timing resources.
San:	If I could just add… I think that personally, I am always on the lookout for things to make the module more appealing, both visually and texturally. I have been developing things like robodemo films, which really assists, I think off campus students. Rather than just read instructions, I think if you can see instructions in action it is so much better. I think that DSO and online teaching in general, we are only at the tip of it, we are only at the start and I am really looking forward to further developments in online teaching and learning. Because we are so new, I can't articulate what they might be yet, but I am really looking forward to going about it just because of how convinced I am that this is the way to go for teaching legal research skills to a dispersed population. You can't do it any other way.
Int:	Thank you very much.
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