An Interview with Bardo Fraunholz
(“Inter” refers to the interviewer, “Fraunholz” refers to Bardo Fraunholz)
Inter:	Bardo, I'm really interested in the aims of the Business Systems Information unit. I know it's a first year core unit in a Commerce degree, how would you define its aims and purposes?
Fraunholz:	Dale, I think I would probably start off with giving a bit of history on the idea of the unit. Originally, when the unit was implemented it was a time when people weren't used to computers, and in those days we needed to teach our students how to even switch on their computer and then give them basic commands to actually do something with the machine. Today the focus has changed because people are more used to computers and we are quite aware of students being able to possibly use Word or Excel. They're quite happy using a computer for Web browsing nowadays. So, we're not actually teaching them the basics of computing anymore. But we've moved on, we're teaching them advanced things like Database. We're trying to make them understand concepts of how computers and information systems works in a business context.
Inter:	The unit has quite a long history of development and there was quite a radical change in the approach to putting the materials together and you may not have been there at that point in time when that happened, Bardo, but you're Unit Chair now, it seems to me the unit's been developed incrementally year by year with quite a lot of innovation. How do you see the process and the value of actually developing digital and online environments in this sort of incremental way?
Fraunholz:	Well, being information systems people we certainly have an interest in modern technology in multimedia and I'm personally – well, I've got a history in multimedia because I come from a publishing and advertising background. So, for me personally it's a very, very logical and continuing thing to do to go multimedia as far as possible for the use in teaching. Over the years, as my understanding is, that unit has evolved from a purely paper based unit to now having a multimedia CD for teaching purposes. So, the way I see it is we're using technology as information systems people to teach people – students information systems by using the technology that we're actually teaching them.
Inter:	In terms of how you see effective teaching and learning in business information systems, do you have a – a kind of philosophy or model in mind which drives your shaping of the digital media and the way you set up and work an online environment? How do you see good teaching and learning in the discipline?
Fraunholz:	I think it's a bit of a challenge because at the moment information systems and IT is in decline. Student numbers are going back and we are challenged because we need to attract students to see the need for information systems. So, the way I see it is to make it fun and make it most applied. So, the unit has been very focussed on technology in the past and we are now shaping it in a sort of incremental way to make it more business focussed. We introduce business models, we have tried to focus on business applications in the unit and certainly in terms of multimedia we are trying to give the students as much as possible on a CD so they are not actually needed to go online to do any research on the Web, download big files as video files that we're using now to bring the message across of certain issues. We're doing interviews with senior people in the industry and academia to try to bring the point across of what we're actually teaching them.
Inter:	And you mention your background in multimedia and – and this sort of multimedia CD ROM that's being developed over time for the unit. How do you see the value of bringing together in a digital form all these different resources on the CD-ROM. How would you define the value of that from a learning perspective?
Fraunholz:	I think this is still in the trial stages because we're trying to implement concepts and in a way we're testing the reaction of the students. We haven't really finalised the model yet because from year to year we find that students receive our material online better than the previous year, and this might be partly to do with the students getting more computer literate and, therefore, not needing the paper based information as much. But it might also be because we are improving the technology that we use year by year. It's easier to use. It really is an auto start CD. You put it in there and students can click and can explore their way through the material. So, it's very self-explanatory. When we started out it wasn't quite so easy for the students to use. So, we're kind of moving in an area where multimedia becomes so easy to use and more entertaining and, therefore, I think, the students find the ease of use most important. As an educational value, which is probably the question that you're asking me, I think the jury is still out on that one because we cannot really identify that the CDs that we produce enhances the learning experience in terms of results for that unit. We get positive feedback from our students and they certainly appreciate the richness of the material and in a way we're also facing a danger here because we provide them with a lot of material online, or on the CD, and at the same time it somehow seems to be a limitation for the students because it stops them exploring books and other material that they used to do in the past. So, I think we really need to still work on that concept to make it work in the long run.
Inter:	Now, Bardo, I suppose the traditional model of distance ed. at Deakin and particularly the commerce programme, has been a study guide and reader, and certainly no digital material on CD. There still is a study guide for the unit, does it go out in printed form to students anymore?
Fraunholz:	It does. We've got a printed study guide in the unit and probably as a tribute to the traditionalists in the unit. I personally wouldn't see it as necessary for the unit and we've now reduced it to basically covering the sort of headlines in each topic. We're just giving a very, very short introduction in the study guide. It's become a very, very thin study guide just to guide the students to the relevant literature and possibly the relevant lecture slides on the CD. So, yes there is a study guide but it's been a minimilistic approach to having a study guide and it really is only there because – well, there still is an expectation of a printed study guide.
Inter:	Now, the BIS road map which sort of lays out the structure of the content of the subject almost now seems to become in the new form of electronic study guide as the print study guide is gradually, fading away, it's still there. Do you see that as a definite break coming with the unit now that the road map on the CD is the pivotal starting point for guiding them through the study of the unit subject matter?
Fraunholz:	I personally would see that for this particular unit as the model to go. There's a couple of different models to produce material online or on CDs and the road map is probably one of three as being proven as successful. For this unit I think it's perfectly okay to go into the road map concept and get rid of the study guide because the material and the structure's there on the CD. It's easily accessible for the students and it's a lot richer in the way we're presenting it. In subjects that might be a little bit more heavy on the theoretical side, unlike the business information systems which is very applied, we might still need a different form to present more text based material. Because at the moment in the road map concept that we're using we're using a concept that provides videos, images. It provides audio documentation, it provides lecture slides, it provides brief bullet points to cover certain materials. This is a good concept for a practical business information system subject but it might not be the answer to everything.
Inter:	Now, I suppose, Bardo, that even first year, first term semester students become very fixated on the formal assessment requirements of the unit and like to duck in and see what they need to do to pass or excel in the unit so the assignment work must be very important. Now, could you give us some idea of the nature of the assignment work that you set and how you try and support the doing of that work in the online environment part of the unit?
Fraunholz:	That's a very interesting question, Dale, because I think 120 – MSC120 has a very, very unique model in that respect. We are very heavy on assignments. We've got three assignments during the course of the semester which in a very large unit is an awful lot. And the first assignment has now been moved to an interactive assignment which is done on Deakin Studies Online. So, the students basically go into the system and part of the assignment is actually making them look and learn from the system. So, we sort of set tasks and they have to actually achieve certain tasks to pass that assignment. It's in a way a treasure hunt online for them. It's not a big assignment, it's only worth 5%, but it's very interactive and it forces the student to actually go online and explore the systems. Our second assignment is running tutorial based so the online component there is not as large as it might be. But it is a database assignment so we're still looking at practical computing. The support for that particular assignment is run by having a discussion group in the online forum where students can exchange their views and can ask questions to the main expert on staff, as well as getting basically any material online so that they can accomplish that particular task and the tutorial. On top of that they certainly have tutors to help them out and for the off-campus we also have tutors online that will help them out when they have any problems. The third assignment is a really interesting one. As I see it it's probably the most challenging assignment for first semester students because we've got a group assignment which has to be accomplished fully online. And a fully online environment for a lot of our first semester students is a really big challenge because the way we compile groups is we compile groups across different cohorts. So, what we do is we take two students from our Burwood cohort, we have one from our Geelong cohort and one student from either Warrnambool or off-campus. So, we've got groups of four students which have no chance in the world to actually have a regular face to face meeting because they're hundreds of kilometres apart. So, they are forced to find alternative ways to communicate. And the online forum and the people write for them, is an individual group folder that they can use as a repository to store data and information and communicate in. And we as teachers, we are monitoring those folders and we're looking at what they're doing and we're providing feedback online to them as they go along. So, it's a fully online education experience in an environment which is challenging in the first place even if you can meet face to face, because as we all know group work is dependent on everybody pulling it's weight. So, the students find it extremely challenging but at the end of the semester we usually get very positive feedback on it because the students appreciate the experience and they certainly appreciate what they've learnt about the online environment.
Inter:	It sounds really interesting, Bardo, because obviously one of the key graduate attributes in Deakin advantage relates to developing collaboration and team work skills, communication skills. Presumably in the real world of IS or information technology work now which is sort of networked and global, there must be a large virtual component to actually doing good work in the industry in an online environment. Is that the reason why you introduced them to an online group work assignment so early?
Fraunholz:	I think – there's probably multiple reasons. One of them comes from my personal research background in research and project management. Nowadays, we find a lot of project management groups and development groups and software project management is done as virtual projects. So, I find the virtuality and the dealing with virtuality extremely important for practical reasons. The other reason is that we believe that every core unit in our degree should have a core competence that it stresses as one of the main competencies in that particular unit. And MSC120 is the one that promotes the course work, or group work as a particular core competency. So, on top of it being a very important issue, certainly we are trying to excel students in learning group work because it is something they will have to do for the whole of their degree. And it's really, really important and really one of the most difficult skills to learn. And I think just giving them an early start at this is a very rewarding experience and it makes them aware of the problems that are related to it. And somehow at that stage an easy start into a difficult problem because in the first semester subject we're still very generous, so they get an early start and they haven't got an awful lot to lose at that stage. And that's why we're doing it at this very early level.
Inter:	Now, we've concentrated a lot on the digital and the online and lest we forget, Bardo, the importance of classroom teaching, it is a first semester first year unit and you give lectures and you run tutorials. How do you see the classroom teaching as making a distinctive contribution to student learning in relating to the digital and the online environment?
Fraunholz:	Dale, we've had a lot of discussion in the unit team on how the classroom teaching is actually seen in our particular unit. And it goes as far as being as extreme as giving the view that we don't need lectures in this unit any more. And that's probably a little bit too revolutionary for a university that still has on-campus teaching. But the philosophy behind it is that the material that you provide becomes so rich and interactive that the main focus really doesn't need to be on the lecture and the face to face teaching any more. We certainly still do active face to face teaching and the majority of our students turn up every week and they enjoy our lectures because our approach to teaching the subject is we're using the lecture slides as a basis for our teaching, but we don't slavishly follow the road map. We've provided such a rich road map with a lot of slides. We're now up to 657 slides in that unit, and if you wanted to present that many slides in 12 weeks of lectures you would probably have a slide show where the students would kind of get dizzy by just the slides flying past all the time. So, the way we do it is we try to promote concepts and we talk about the issues that are important by giving very practical mostly international examples of what we are actually trying to achieve. And by focussing on the difficult topics that need more explanation. When you come to the tutorial it suddenly changes because the tutorial is a practical experience for the students. The students sit in front of a computer. Each student has one computer which, in a big unit like MSC120 is a real challenge. But we find it incredibly important that the student gets the practical experience on having the hands on experience of sitting in front of the computer doing things, to a certain degree even doing trial and error, but under the guidance of the tutor they don't go too far astray. We try to set tutorial questions that are highly practical and feed into the business environment and business context so that they see the use of why they have to actually bother with the computer and how it feeds into business and the main focus of their degree they want to specialise in later, it might be accounting, it might be economics.
Inter:	Now, I guess your business is the business of education and in some ways you set up a business information system as an education information system to take care of the needs of your clients, the students. And I think one key aspect of any information system is sort of admin. efficiency. I'm really interested in the sort of technologies you use to actually receive, mark, provide feedback, collate results in regard to the assignments and how that's handled in regard to your business information system.
Fraunholz:	As you say Dale, this is really a big challenge in a big unit. We're teaching this unit to around about 1500 students across three campuses and even international campuses on top of that. So, we've got a widespread community of students that will be taught by different lecturers at different locations at different times with different tutors and there's a vast variety of people involved in that unit. So the administration, as you point out Dale, is really important, and one of the things you can't afford, you can't afford to get it wrong. So, I've often been wondering when I was running the unit last semester how we would have been able to do this unit without information system support. And in previous years, admittedly the class sizes would have been a little bit smaller but they would probably have 6 or 700 students, and I can't imagine nowadays how you could run it without electronic tools. The way we run the unit is we get the students to submit their assignments via the online and the environment in DSO and we then distribute the assignments by basically sending them out electronically to our markers. We train our markers online so they know the standard to what they're supposed to mark. They get very thorough marking guidelines and then when they come back the unit Chair, which is me, has to moderate the marks so that we are sure that all the assignments are marked in the same way. This is all done fully online fully electronically. We don't print out assignments, we don't actually have any paper circulated for doing that. The markers provide a feedback sheet. This feedback sheet gets generated electronically and the markers send back a feedback sheet for every individual student, which I then collate into the central database and I will then, by using email, send out an individual feedback sheet to each individual student in that unit, so that every student in that unit can actually see what would have been improvement on the course work done, what kind of mistakes, what kind of good answers that the particular student has given. So, we are very, very keen to provide detailed feedback in that unit. And as I say, with 1500 students it's an awful lot of paper that you would have normally been moving around and it's all done electronically by using a database, by using a DSO environment, by using Excel and by using email. One of the other things that I might want to add is that in that unit we find ourselves in allowing the students to challenge their marks. We're giving them the electronic feedback sheet and they have, and very rightly so, queries on why that particular statement was made. And we then have a staff member, or a few staff members, that will then provide answer and feedback on the feedback sheet if the student has any query regarding that.
Inter:	Bardo, I'm really sort of fascinated in – you know, you talk about this blended teaching and learning environment which is part virtual and part in the classroom in the physical world. What's the experience of actually teaching on a week to week basis in terms of what you're doing and how the students are responding to it? You know, what's your sense of how students go about learning and what they're learning in the unit on a week to week basis?
Fraunholz:	This is a really difficult question for me to answer because, as you say, a lot of it is virtual and the virtuality of it – and as much as I'm fascinated by virtuality, sometimes it's a bit sad for us as a teacher because the direct feedback and the direct richness that you get from a student in a classroom somehow gets lost. Because we are still doing both I still have both, and for my on campus group I get a lot of feedback and they come and see me in my office and want to be there after lectures and want to ask questions, and there's a lot of traditional interaction as has always been. In the virtual world it becomes a lot less interactive in terms of direct communication because communication is filtered by an electronic medium. So, communication is – we're used to more important communication, specific questions, problems that students have and, I'm happy to say at the end of semester also, emails of appreciation of what we have done. But overall I still prefer the face to face teaching experience as a teacher because it's more rewarding.
Inter:	I'm not sure there's an ideal perfect world of higher education and classroom teaching in the virtual side of it, Bardo, but where do you think the unit might go in the future? Or if you had a magic wand and you could create an ideal world, where do you think it might be a bit down the track?
Fraunholz:	Asking about sort of visions for the future and the dream ideal version of the unit, well, I still think I would want to see the unit very much where it is today. I think I'm actually quite happy with the unit as it is. One of the things that we are working on and it's happening on a year by year basis, is we are moving the unit more and more away from the bare technology and more and more into the business environment. Because information system changes and the technology changes, certain technologies just drop off because they become obsolete. We need to introduce new technologies and we are now focussing very much on introducing the technology in an applied context. So, I think that's the vision for the future for me in that unit. I think, in an ideal world, I would not want to have the unit fully online. And for personal and possibly egotistic reasons I would probably still want to maintain the face to face contact with my on-campus students. And I think as much as we appreciate the richness of multimedia teaching it is still going to be different even in the long run to having a face to face conversation with a student. And as long as a student in an online environment or off-campus situation is a self-paced student and has the ability to motivate themselves, I think we are doing quite well with that unit, giving them a lot of material, keeping it very much multimedia based and trying to enhance that experience. When we're talking about the younger students just fresh out of school, I think they might need a little bit more hand holding still. So, I think the model is pretty good as it is and the way I would like the unit to go is pretty much just improving the road that we're going down at the moment.
	close this window