An Interview with Christine Goodwin
“Int” refers to the interviewer and “Christine” refers to Christine Goodwin
Int:	I am speaking with Christine Goodwin who is an academic in the Faculty of Business and Law. Welcome Chris.
Christine:	Thanks Mary.
Int:	What is your role in the Faculty of Business and Law in respect to teaching and learning?
Christine:	I have a triple role really in the Faculty of Business and Law. One part of my role is to support the staff who are doing their teaching online, so in an online learning environment, so yes I’m an academic but I don’t actually teach any of our students online. I teach the staff how to teach online. So I support the staff in their online learning environments in developing the student activities and the best way to deliver both interaction and content in the university’s online learning environment, Deakin Studies Online. And a second part of my role is to support the students who are studying in that online learning environment, which has changed a lot over the last few years. I used to be directly involved with student support whereas now, that is talking to them on the phone and helping them with their problems, but now I’m more involved in developing resources to help the students and the direct student support is done much more centrally so that role has changed quite a bit. The third part of my role is to actually work with other people within the university, in other divisions in the university such as Learning Services to ensure that the faculties’ needs are being met and that there is an understanding of our strategic priorities.
Int:	Can you just elaborate a little on the resources that you’ve developed?
Christine:	Resources for …?
Int:	Students.
Christine:	Students, okay, because I’ve developed resources both for staff and students.
Int:	Okay.
Christine:	Okay, so the staff ones are like, you know, ‘how to’ sheets, ‘cheat’ sheets which are developed specifically for our faculty’s learning environment so they’re very, very specific, you know, when you do screen shots they’re actually shots of our environment so that when a staff member looks at them, that it is directly the same as what’s on their screen. I have found that for many staff who are not experienced online teachers, making that translation from a generic picture to what’s actually on their screen is sometimes difficult, they need to see exactly what’s on their screen. So we’ve got a number of staff resources in terms of how to do certain things online, recommendations on appropriate ways to deliver content, things like, ‘have you checked to make sure that the copyright is cleared’, ‘what size is the file’, ‘what sort of software does the student need’? These are all considerations that you need to think about when you’re going to put the material online. On the students’ side of it, again it’s a series of self help resources, you know, ‘How do you submit an assignment online and what happens if you’ve got a problem, you know? How do you check if you’ve submitted it correctly, how do you know if your file’s attached, those kinds of things that are self help resources. And again, they’re specific to our environment so they’ve been developed particularly with our processes in mind.
Int:	I see. So what are the similarities and differences you see in staff members’ views of online teaching and learning by discipline and professional field?
Christine:	By discipline and professional field there’s not a lot of differences based specifically on a discipline or professional view apart from perhaps the people involved in Information Technology and Information Systems, just much more open to doing things on a computer to start with, right, because that’s what they work with all the time. I tend to find that there’s not those differences based on discipline or profession, it’s more about those who have… who feel comfortable with a computer as opposed to those who don’t, and those people who have spent all of their teaching lives working in a face to face environment sometimes find it difficult to translate those activities into an online environment and it does take a bit of a shift. So you’ve got cross spectrum of disciplines and professions, you’ve got those people who are very keen online teachers and those people who are being dragged into it really because it’s seen as a strategic priority for the university.
Int:	Okay. Now you’ve spoken a bit about the resources you’ve developed for students, what experiences have you had in supporting students learning online directly?
Christine:	As I mentioned earlier, when I first started 10 years ago, working with online learning environments 10 years ago, the direct student support was done within the faculty because that movement towards online learning grew out of the faculties, not just the Business and Law Faculty, other faculties as well. But because it was grounded within the faculties and it was enthusiastic users within the faculty who were experimenting with this way of teaching, the student support had to be there too, because it wasn’t being provided centrally. Okay! In more recent years the university has moved to focus on online teaching and learning and therefore, the centrally provided resources are much greater. So in my early years I used to do a lot of student support. I would spend hours on the phone helping students work out their particular issues, their particular problems and that’s, when you think about it, way back in the early days of windows and the very first web browsers 10 years ago so we’ve come a long, long way since then. Now, I rarely do direct student support unless it is a particular problem that no one else has been able to work out or fix, it’s been escalated through to me. As I said, I developed the resources, the self help resources, I proactively provide those resources or alert students to the presence of those resources in order to try and help them solve their problems themselves, but then I do get some student support requests come through to me in the end because it’s something specific to do with our faculty or the way something has been set up.
Int:	Okay, so have you observed changes in students’ attitudes and approaches to using the technology over that period of time?
Christine:	Oh, definitely, over 10 years, absolutely. Ten years ago, as I said, the first web browser was just being released into the market and there was very few people who used it. I remember going to MBA residential schools and showing them NASDAQ, the stock market, on the internet and it was wonderful. Now there wouldn’t be a financial advisor out there now worth his salt that didn’t know where all of these things were on the internet. So, because our exposure to the internet has grown so much over that period of time and we have become more used to using it in our everyday lives, you know, then we’ve seen the attitudes to online learning change as well in students. It used to be a chore, it used to be difficult, they couldn’t see a lot of benefit in it, whereas now I think because people are used to finding information and doing things online, the students are seeing value in having both their content and a lot of their interaction happening online now too because they’re very busy. It enables them to participate at a time that’s more suitable for them rather than at a fixed time. Yes, big change in attitudes over 10 years.
Int:	Alright, focussing now on communication, what are the main factors to consider when designing and undertaking online communication? So what leads to success do you think?
Christine:	Successful communication within a teaching environment or a learning environment, I should say, a learning environment, really needs a number of things. One is it needs to have enthusiastic participation by the teacher. They have to need to be there and want to interact with those students as part of their teaching experience, their teaching work. So it needs, yeah, enthusiastic participation by the teacher. Reward for the students. If the students can see that there is a reason for them to participate, and a reason for them to communicate and that they will benefit and gain from it, then they’re more likely to do so and there’ll be more success in that communication aspect of their learning. Now, that could be because they’re provided marks for doing it, but it could also be because they’re given additional learning experience, additional pathways to assist them in their learning than what they might get just, say, from reading something on the screen. By doing that discussion and doing that talking and that communication, it enlightens them more. Trouble is a lot of students don’t realise that that’s what will happen, that if they do participate and talk about it that will happen. A lot of them, because they’re prioritising their time, if there’s not marks attached to it, then they won’t participate, so it comes down to the reward and making them aware of the reward. A bit of structure, you do need to have a bit of structure in an online learning environment so that it’s easy for people to find the communication that they want to read or take part in and reply to, so that they can spend the time that they’re online getting the most value out of that time and that communication time, rather than searching through trying to find where they’re supposed to put something, or where they’re supposed reply to something, that kind of thing, so a little bit of structure. Timing. If you are expecting students to participate in a communication activity, a discussion activity, perhaps a group discussion or a tutorial discussion, things do take longer online and so you need to allow a longer period of time for things to happen. For instance, you might, instead of setting a weekly task, it might be a fortnightly task. It allows that bit more flexibility for particularly the off campus students but increasingly now also on campus students who have, you know, almost full time jobs some of them in order to support their studies, to give them more flexibility and time to participate, time to reflect and think about what they’re participating in and what their responses should be, so that instead of getting the, oh yeah I agree, you get something more thoughtful, so allowing that time. So what did we have there? We had an enthusiastic teacher, we had reward for participation, a bit of structure and timing, thinking about your timing. That probably covers it.
Int:	Very good advice, Chris. So what have you found to be the advantages and disadvantages of online, collaborative work, especially in regard to assessment?
Christine:	Collaborative work with regard to assessment is difficult whether it be online or offline because you are always going to have that inequality of participation and the students in the group who feel that Joe Blow over there shouldn’t get as many marks because they didn’t participate as much and the frustration of getting things done by a group of people on time and by certain deadlines. It doesn’t matter whether it’s online or offline, those things are going to happen. The extra time that it takes for getting things done online tends to exacerbate that a little though, in that meeting those deadlines… a group of people meeting their deadlines is probably a little harder when they are doing it all online than it is if they could physically meet face to face. It’s also easier for them to avoid. They’re not looking somebody in the eye and making the excuse as to why they haven’t done something, you know. They’re able to sort of slide out of it because it’s just a few words on a screen. So there are some extra things to cope with in terms of group management and participation of students.
Int:	But the advantages?
Christine:	Advantages. As I said before for our students, both off campus and on campus, the students are less and less able to commit to meeting at certain times and in certain places so a big advantage, of course, for off campus students is that they are able to participate in this group work experience and, my underlying premise here is that it is good for students to work in teams and groups. I mean, I believe in collaborative learning so I’m taking that as a given, so that the off campus students are able to participate in these collaborative learning exercises by being online, so the advantage is that they can do that. On campus students increasingly have other commitments and so being able to meet online gives them the opportunity to perhaps participate more fully than they could have if they were just meeting physically.
Int:	So, I guess in terms of the disadvantages, are some of the problems being ironed out or, from year to year, are they much the same as they were 5 or 10 years ago?
Christine:	Yes, I think they are much the same as they were 5 or 10 years ago. It’s human nature and you’re not going to be able to resolve those issues. We have always had, and probably will always have, difficulty in organising our roles within a group and making sure that the participation is felt to be the same that give benefits to all members of the group.
Int:	Do you think students get better at it over the years, so are third years better than first years?
Christine:	Certainly I think a third year would be better than a first year because they’ve been through the experience, but we still have the problems out in the workforce. You graduate and you go out and you’re still going to have difficulties working in teams. It’s because of our human nature but I think doing it at university is important because it does give you the experience. What we don’t as a university do very well is teach the students how to work in groups. Now, I’ve said as a university. Perhaps I should say they're more as a faculty. We haven’t focussed on that. We’ve said, right, you’re going to work in group but we haven’t focussed on teaching them how to work in groups. Possibly because of the time restrictions, we don’t have a spare couple of weeks to work through those things before they actually start on their coursework, you know, it could be a time issue. So, I think we do need to focus on, perhaps, some of those self help resources and we are starting to do that, pointing the students at resources to help them understand what it is like to work in a group and how they can manage in a group. The anonymity of being online within a group is still an issue. I don’t think… I guess, maybe, with new technologies coming through, perhaps when we’re doing, you know, using webcams or something like that and you’re actually looking, you’ve got more a sense of physical presence on someone, then we may overcome some of those issues.
Int:	What take home messages could you share, Chris, in respect to teaching and learning online, for example, what technologies might be usefully developed or adopted in the future?
Christine:	Oh, it’s an open field. I wouldn’t like to pick and choose. I think it’s up to us all to look at what tools are available to us and are coming online and think imaginatively about if it’s possible to use them in some ways to enhance our teaching and the students’ learning. I don’t think you can say that one particular tool is better than another because people learn in different ways and, therefore, if we’re able to identify different technologies and use them in different ways – our problem is going to be resourcing. The more and more technologies that we do adopt, the more difficult it becomes to resource their development and their proper use and ensuring the quality of that delivery too, the quality of the learning environment. Because you’re spreading those resources thinner, it is not always possible to ensure that the students get the best experience because you’ve got to have the support mechanisms there for both staff and students to get the best out of using a particular technology in both the development of the material and the teaching activity and the actual implementation of it, the actual doing of it. I think that resourcing is not going to be covered sufficiently enough to allow students every technology in its best way. So yeah, as you say, we do need to prioritise what we think will give us the best advantages. I guess I’ve come round in a circle then haven’t I because I’m saying now that you do have to pick and choose, whereas, I started off saying that I wouldn’t like to pick and choose.
Int:	Any other take home messages in respect to that?
Christine:	Online teaching and learning is still definitely a strategic priority for us. I think we are headed down the right paths, but we have got some issues about resourcing and ensuring that people are adequately supported when they venture out, when they take a gamble in an effort to improve the learning environment for their students. There’s a lot of enthusiasm there and we need to tap in on that and keep that going, but it does take a recognition that it is a thing that needs resourcing and it needs support for it to continue to be beneficial to the university and to its students.
Int:	How do you seeing the changing relationship between face to face classroom teaching and online teaching and learning?
Christine:	Okay, I think because of the change in the nature of our students, we are needing to blend those two things together much more than we used to. We used to think of online teaching and learning just being for a particular group of students off campus, those ones who couldn’t come to class, couldn’t come to a face to face class. However, the nature of our students has changed, they are more used to using computers to find information, to participate in things – and their mobile phones. I mean, you’ve only got to look at text messaging and SMS chat and so the face to face interaction is not the be all and end all now of their interactions with people. So whether they are actually able to attend a face to face class or not, the other technologies allow us to capitalise on that changing nature and familiarity that they have and blend the two together. I guess as a human I’ve got to say that I think that face to face classes certainly, and maybe I’m an old fashioned human, face to face classes certainly have benefits. Whether in the future they will disappear too, I don’t know, I hope not. I don’t think they will as long as we’re humans but being able to blend the two together means that students get the best of both worlds.
Int:	You mentioned mobile phone technologies, Chris. Do you have any views about how you might tap into the whole mobile phone phenomenon?
Christine:	Mobile computing and the convergence of the technologies, you know, what you can do with a mobile phone now, not just make a call, are a big part of our online teaching and learning in the future, I think. We need to come to grips with how, again this is technology, how we can use it to best enhance the learning environment. Our students in 10 years time are going to be so familiar with using that phone as part of their everyday lives, so we’re looking here in 10 year gaps kind of thing. Ten years ago the web browser was the new kid on the block and the internet was the new kid on the block and how were we going to use that, you know. Today the internet is so much a part of people’s lives, not everyone I’ve got to say, we do have to be mindful that 90% of the world still doesn’t have internet or doesn’t use it everyday, but specifically talking about our students, they are so familiar with that, that it just is part of their lives and they expect it to be a part of their learning environment too. The mobile phone today is becoming more and more a part of our student’s, young people’s lives and in 10 years time, you’ve got to think well maybe it’s going to be like the internet, you know, it just going to be ubiquitous and so how do we tap into that?
Int:	Yes, that will be for the future.
Christine:	Yes, indeed.
Int:	Thanks very much for your time, Chris.
	close this window