An Interview with Jan Fermelis
(“Inter” refers to the interviewer, “JF” refers to Jan Fermelis)
Inter:	Jan you're unit team chair of a business communication unit, a very large unit taught in the BCom, a core unit, multi-modal, multi-campus, very large diverse student cohort. I guess starting at the beginning I am interested in your views on effective teaching and learning and how they've shaped the development and teaching of the unit.
JF:	Okay. It's really hard to be philosophical when often what we have done in the past is been well I suppose it must have been driven by our underlying teaching philosophies. We believe that this is a unit based on skills therefore we have to focus on what skills we are aiming to develop in students. What skills we want to help them understand about themselves. Then work out the best way of going about enabling them to increase their understanding and to improve their skill development and then at the end of the cycle working out the most appropriate means of assessing how well they have developed that skill. So we have a very holistic approach to our teaching. We really have developed a fairly sophisticated program that often only makes sense in hindsight, so new tutors and students sometimes find it a little bit mystifying and really complex at the beginning but at the end actually everything fits into place and various aspects and components of the course support other aspects of the course in terms of content and also in terms of skill development. So I suppose we have a very holistic approach and we feel that we are very responsive to how students experience what we are doing so we continually refine it and those two things more than anything are what the unit has turned out to become.
Inter:	Now it seems like a very important unit because it's dealing with some key generic graduate attributes particularly in the whole area of communication. What distinctive contribution do you think the unit does make to the education of students doing a commerce degree at Deakin? What's it's particular contribution to developing some of these critical graduate attributes?
JF:	Okay. Well the unit had existed for many, many years as a fairly small unit. It became a core unit in direct response to the Deakin Advantage the creation of the Deakin Advantage and those graduate skills and attributes included within the Deakin Advantage. So what we quite explicitly aim to do and quite deliberately aim to do is to try and cover all of the skills and attributes not so much the discipline content ones because I think the disciplines that's their primary function but to cover all of the skills the other skills are the more generic skills and attributes of Deakin graduates as included in the Deakin Advantage. So we use those skills to help drive us in terms of our topic selection. We use those skills to help drive us in terms of the sort of meta skills we are aiming to develop because some skills are developed in only one topic but other skills are developed across several topics. So that's one really major area. What we are aiming to do is to produce students who are much more aware of the various skills they will need in order to acquire a job and in order to work professionally in a successful manner. Also to give the students enough understanding so they can continue to first of all work on developing their skills when they're with us in our unit, and secondly that they can continue to develop them from more of a lifelong learning sort of perspective once they have graduated, so they are aware of what they need to do and they are aware of the components they might be able to address in order to self improve those various skills once they have left the university. And interestingly we get a lot of feedback on those sorts of things from students who have graduated. Often students I see either on campus or out of campus will say to me look at the time I didn't really realise what you were doing but since I've left I've done this and I've used this book and I've found this is really handy and I'm much better at doing such and such than my colleagues are. So anecdotally I'm getting a lot of evidence that students are more self aware. They are better skilled as well. And they also are really aware of where to go and how to continue developing those skills.
Inter:	Now obviously beyond the rationale and purposes of the unit you have established a certain type of teaching and learning environment to help facilitate those learning outcomes you've outlined Jan. I'm really interested in how you situate the online dimension of the overall teaching and learning environment in relation to other things happening in the teaching of the unit like lectures and tutorials and the printed study guide material and so on. Where do you see the role of the online coming in in regard to the overall conception of the environment?
JF:	I think the major advantage of onlineness is the fact that all students in all locations can have access to identical teaching materials and as near as possible identical teaching learning situations. What we do is that we have a fairly extensive coverage of DSO. We have a lot of organisers and within those organisers we have sub-organisers. We tend to focus on developing our DSO organisation based on assessment because for the students, that's what it's all about. And in lots of ways, and I was never taught this at university when I did my DipEd or Masters. However students are mark driven. That's the hip pocket nerve. They want to know how much it's worth and they will work towards that. So that's the reality of our students. And it's probably not just peculiar to Deakin students I would suggest. So what we do is that most of our organisers are built around the various pieces of assessment and we have several pieces of assessment, it being a skills unit and because we're aiming at developing different skills. So within each organiser based on assessment we have detailed information about the assessment task. We have other materials that could be useful for students in completing that piece of assessment. We have a discussion area so that all students from all campuses, onshore, offshore, on-campus and off-campus, can ask the same questions and read the same answers that everyone else is asking and as unit chair I tend to do most of the monitoring of that so the students can be very comfortable that everyone's been given the same advice. So in terms of the assessment outcomes they are all on a fairly even par. Now in terms of week to week teaching, we as a unit team share all the same unit teaching materials. We thought it was a waste of time for people to have different materials, different sets of lecture notes, different sorts of tute prac notes. Therefore we share, we collaboratively and cooperatively create and share those teaching materials. So again that means all students have as near as possible to an identical lecture. Of course different lecturers might add little bits and pieces of words along the way but we all use the same lecture slides. That's on-campus, off-campus and offshore. We offer on-campus students a two hour class every week, a tute and a prac. All tutors on all campuses use the same teaching materials, very detailed teaching materials, about ten pages per week to conduct those. We make those same materials available to our offshore partners and they if they have full time on-campus students they do the same activities. If they have off-campus students as in the case of TMC Singapore, then we negotiate selectively what are the best things for them to do with those students when they do meet face-to-face and what is okay for the students to self-work through. And it also means with off-campus students in Australia we put up the full teaching notes for them, teaching tute prac notes so they can work through if they choose to, an identical, or near enough to identical situation to what on-campus students do. We also audio stream our lectures, which means that those students who choose to come, and I always think it's impossible to beat turning up face-to-face to a lecture, it's worth every minute. So those students who attend can listen to the lecture slides. We have gapped lecture notes so the students have to either physically attend or via DSO listen to the audio version of the lectures to complete their lecture notes. Same lecture slides for everybody. Off-campus students can if they want to have the gapped lecture notes in front of them and sit through and listen to the audio streamed version of the lecture as well. The same for offshore students if they are in an on-campus situation then the lecturer there will give them a lecture. If they're in an off-campus situation they too can sit through and listen to the same lecture. The advantage is a saving of workload and the other main advantages is all students know they have been exposed to the same teaching and learning materials which is only reasonable considering they all have to sit the same exam.
Inter:	Jan I wonder whether you can give us an insight into the typical week of trying to teach the unit online. What sort of happens day-to-day in actually the teacher working those discussion spaces around assessment?
JF:	Okay.
Inter:	What sort of things come up in regard to student questions, queries, discussion and how do you actually work that to a productive outcome?
JF:	Okay. If I look at that in two areas, what the typical working week is and what do the students want from it. If I look at them in two separate areas. First of all we have to make sure that the gap lecture notes are up before the end of the previous week. We need to make sure that we've all got the same as on-campus lecturers, we all have the complete versions and that the gap lecture notes are up. What we also have to do in any one week to prepare for the next week is to make sure that any additional handout type materials, it seems really strange to talk about handouts online but effectively if we were face-to-face we would call them handouts so I still call them handouts. So any extra materials the students might need to have to print off to take to their tute or if they're working totally online to read through in order to prepare for the following week. Then what we do is we audio stream the lecture. I try and audio stream the lecture earlyish in the week so that students have the chance to be exposed to that lecture before the week after that which is when they engage in those topics and activities and concepts in the tute prac session. Okay. So I audio stream that and I have to send that off via the library to be digitally put up on DSO, however that happens. What I then do for the rest of the time is really the face-to-face work. Now in terms of students, what students do is that they ask questions. Now I actually think if they don't ask a lot of questions it means I've probably done a good job of informing them of what they need to do. Because one of the things that drives students to distraction is not being given clear information. Now of course some students choose not to read what is up in front of them but I can't do anything about that. So I need to make sure that all the information I have up either in print form or on DSO is very clearly labelled. I actually find that as a business communication teacher I am constantly having to model what I preach. So not only do I try and teach them about business communication I try to model it myself. Which means that it takes me ages and ages sometimes to set up simple messages. But really well sign-posted, appropriately titled, lots of appropriate sub-headings through so students can find the information they want easily. The next thing I need to do is make sure I am brutally consistent with terminology especially for students who are working wholly online. It's not good enough to use synonyms, you must use the same word for the same thing absolutely consistently, or else they're not sure if it's the same thing or if it's something different. So I need to be really consistent about that. So if I don't get a lot of questions that means I'm pleased, I've probably done a good job. Okay. Second thing students need to have is a quick response time. Now students tend to have really strange working hours. Sometimes it's because they have full time jobs and work at night on their studies. Other times even full time students seem to work quite happily until three or four in the morning then wake up at midday. The working cycles are quite different. So they send off a message on DSO expecting of course that I am going to be at my computer at three o'clock on a Wednesday morning. Which I'm not. However students soon pick up whether or not you are going to respond to their question quickly. That usually means perhaps 48 hours. Over the weekend they will be a bit forgiving so at the beginning of the semester I say they'll be regularly monitored at least three times during the week, sometimes occasionally on the weekend because I do sometimes work on a Saturday. So if they know they're going to get a quick response and you can see it in their responses afterwards. They're very happy to get their question attended to quickly because invariably they'll tend to leave it a little bit late to ask a question and invariably it will relate to an assessment piece of work which is what it's all about. They are aiming to get the best marks possible. So they expect a prompt response. They also expect it to be intuitively easy to navigate through DSO. And that's why we reorganised our site this semester translating over from FirstClass to focus more on pieces of assessment work and we've found that has simplified the process. Anything to do with assignment one or assignment two they know exactly where to look and then within that organiser if the other areas are arranged logically and intuitively, they can find what they need. So they expect to be able to find things easily and quickly as well.
Inter:	I believe too Jan that one of the key pieces of formal assessment is a professional portfolio.
JF:	Yeah.
Inter:	I wonder whether you might be able to explain, you know, what that is and what's the benefit of doing it. And I believe you're quite interested in the idea of the electronic professional portfolio
JF:	Hmmm mm.
Inter:	And you might have done some experimentation in that area so you might want to comment on that as well.
JF:	Okay. Yes. That's the final piece of assessment, a professional portfolio. The professional portfolio contains three different things. First of all it contains a reflective journal. They have to maintain a reflective journal making a specified number of entries, a specified number of words throughout the semester and that specifically focuses on the interpersonal communication within the unit, within the two pieces of work that have a team component. So we introduce that in the very first tutorial so that's in week two, and we give suggestions about approximately how many entries they should make relating to the first piece of group work, and how many entries they should make relating to the second piece of group work. We also put models up there because we find that model entries are sometimes more helpful than explanations. So that's the first component. They have to maintain a journal that adds up to about 1400 words throughout the semester. The second component is a job application letter, because we cover communication for employment as a theme within our unit and we teach students how to analyse advertisements and how to create effective application letters which are heavily focussed on the criteria or skills which are included within the original advertisement. And we know from student feedback that as soon as they start doing that their success rates in terms of getting through to an interview increase enormously. The third piece of work within the professional portfolio is a CV. Now most students have some form of CV. Sometimes it's really good, more often it's not very good. And if students follow the guidelines we teach within our unit and then restructure their CV in response to those guidelines we also find that their success rates increase. Now some students choose to do that but because that's the last piece of assessment we do actually see a few recycled Year 12 CVs which score very poorly and are more a response to, you know, poor management issues on behalf of the students. So at the moment the portfolio contains those three things. Now the students have to submit that electronically via DSO and for the off-campus students that's all they have to do. On-campus students have to also produce a hard copy because sessional markers mark that piece of work and it's much more pragmatically useful to have hard copies to give to the sessional markers. Now as part of that for on and off or for about two or three years, I have been trialling some electronic portfolio software. We've used that to assist students to create a CV and to assist them to create their covering letter. I haven't analysed the most recent results from students about this. They like the concept of having a an electronic portfolio. However they are really driven by assessment and yes I'll make entries if I'm going to get marked by it. They expect it to be very easily used. They expect it to be intuitive and they expect it to produce results quickly but interestingly they also want to be able to personalise their CV and covering letter. It's as if they've picked up that yes I have to make mine stand out in some way and if I can use some software which makes it easier, not harder, it has to be easier for me to create it. Then that's great. Then afterwards I'll fiddle with it and tweak it so it actually physically looks a bit different because I don't want to have a generic looking CV. So bit of a contrast in there.
Inter:	Hmmm mm.
JF:	One thing I'm considering to do for next year because we are always slightly tweaking our teaching is to include within each piece of assessment an extra sheet that they just tick off in terms of what the various skills are that they have used or developed for each piece of assessment and then have a summary sheet within their professional portfolio so they'll overview the semester's work. I don't want them to actually produce any more work but even on a checklist basis to make them more aware of yes I have worked on all of these skills throughout the semester, because we're getting more and more feedback from people who work in graduate careers that students need to be able to verbalise their skill acquisition, not just say yes I've got good writing skills but to be able to break writing skills down into different areas and to give evidence of those, like explain pieces of different pieces of work they've done and this is a way of them verbalising their awareness and their improved self understanding of what their skills are. So if I can make the link between what we have created in order to develop their skills, make that link stronger so they can see on a piece of paper, on a grid or a checklist, that yes these two pieces of work did these skills, and these two pieces of work did those skills and how they all linked in together, then I think that will make them much stronger interviewees once they get through to the employment context.
Inter:	Jan you mention that you continue to tweak the unit probably based on a range of stakeholder feedback including that from students.
JF:	Hmmm mm.
Inter:	If you had to reflect on you know what have you learnt in regard to designing and operating the online environment part of the unit well, what have been the key lessons learnt and I wonder how you think students have experienced the unit as an overall environment.
JF:	I might start with the second one. Students value DSO if they can quickly and easily find the information they need. They are very impatient with technology. If the technology let's them down they don't take it lightly. If it let's them down twice they're very unforgiving. So the technology must make their learning easier in some way and/or richer, but they tend to focus on the easier component rather than the enrichment aspect which is probably more of what I'm looking for. So it has to be reliable. It has to be intuitively organised and on that we're thinking of next semester rearranging some of our organisers to follow more of a learning module format. Because we're finding we are using the online environment so much that when you get a screen covered with icons that that is less helpful for students. So the good old fashioned hierarchical arrangement on the left-hand side which is what learning modules have I think, will be easier for students to find their way through. Okay. So at the moment we're archiving everything we've got onto a CD and looking to rearrange a lot of the organisers using a learning module physical arrangement rather than the icons, because it's okay when you've only got about half a dozen icons but once you have more than that it becomes too hard for students to find things. So that's one thing I've learnt. It's gotta be easy. The other thing is it's got to be reliable and that's something totally out of my control. One more thing I've learnt from the last twelve months is that pdfs can be a real problem for students and we are all encouraged to put everything into pdf form which I did and it's not terribly difficult, but it's yet another three or four steps for every single document so next year I'm aiming to try and put up most documents if not all in html format. I believe that it has lower bandwidth requirements is that what it is? And really I am not fussed if students choose to alter an assignment sheet, a piece of information on an assignment sheet, that's their problem. It's got nothing to do with me. I know what I put up and if they say well your assignment sheet's something or rather else and I know it's different, well that's not my issue. I know what I put up. So that should simplify the procedure. Also for off-campus students I know I had one experience in Malaysia a couple of years ago where I wanted to get one of my readings off the library server and it was in pdf form and it took me an hour and not all of our students have the latest top notch technology and I just don't think that's fair. So that's something else I've learnt and that fits into the ease as well. Students are becoming very impatient with technology. It's got to work for them quickly and it's got to be reliable for them and it's got to enhance their learning not make it more complex.
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