An Interview with Annegret Goold
(“Inter” refers to the interviewer, “Goold” refers to Annegret Goold)
Inter:	Today I’m with Annegret Goold in the corner café outside the library in Burwood and we chose this opportunity to have a chat about Annagret’s work as an online teaching and learning Fellow and the unit that she is developing. So perhaps Annegret if you could give us a bit of background to where you’re coming from.
Goold:	In terms of my pedagogy or just concrete facts about the unit and student cohorts, etc?
Inter:	A bit of both, I mean, how have you come to online teaching and the story up until now.
Goold:	Oh dear, how much time have we got? My background is obviously as an IT person but one of the things I’m most concerned about is providing students with real life experiences so that when they get out there in the real world they have the knowledge and the practices to be able to first of all survive and secondly to become effective workers in that area. One of the things that’s been happening over the last couple of years has been a change in our curriculum and we’re introducing a new unit in third year called IT Practice. And IT Practice is a unit that will provide experiential learning opportunities for students. It’s also a unit that has been nominated to be delivered wholly online, so there are a number of constraints and a number of opportunities I think in delivering this unit.
Inter:	It’s an interesting unit in terms of its content and especially in terms of its content going online. Perhaps if you could tell us a bit about what type of unit it’s going to be, that would be really good?
Goold:	What it’s going to look like online?
Inter:	Yeah.
Goold:	Okay, what I’m hoping is that it will have a problem based learning pedagogy, which I think you call it something else James.
Inter:	Task based learning, it doesn’t have to be a problem.
Goold:	Okay, but what that really means is that I would like students to become immersed in a particular activity that relates to professional practice. But to make this activity authentic it needs to be in a particular context and hence the idea of creating a resource called, at the moment it will be United Enterprises, which will provide students with, well we’re not quite sure what it is, but a whole lot of resources that they can access, explore and use to solve their problem or their problems.
Inter:	What kind of tasks do you see students having in this virtual organisation?
Goold:	Okay, at the moment we haven’t really defined what we think will be good IT practices but I have certain ideas about what they should be. For one thing I think a focus on writing good technical documentation. Some of my colleagues think there should be an element of project management in the unit. But whatever it is, it doesn’t really matter what the task is at this stage, the important thing is that we have the right context in which to develop the particular solutions.
Inter:	Perhaps if you could kind of tell us about the kind of context. I mean, how do you envisage like a student experience being in the United Enterprises, in IT practice?
Goold:	Okay, well I’m not quite sure what United Enterprises will finally be but I’m presuming it will be some sort of an intranet that students can access. But one of the fundamental things underlying this whole organisation is that once the students enter this organisation they will become part of it. In other words this artificial role of teachers and students is completely gone in this United Enterprises. So the teaching staff will actually be staff within United Enterprises. So they may be people such as help desk operators, they might be team managers, they might be the CEO, so all communication will be through staff at United Enterprises rather than teaching staff. So if you like, the teaching staff will be role playing particular roles in the organisation.
Inter:	And will the students be on their own or in groups or?
Goold:	No, they’ll be working in groups. I see them as working in consulting teams so they will have a particular problem to solve. Teams of perhaps somewhere between four and ten students and they will need to actually research and explore United Enterprises to get resources to help them solve their particular task. And to access the resources also means contacting and communicating with the appropriate staff in United Enterprises.
Inter:	You mentioned the kind of intranet set up of it. How are you conceiving of that, of the technology working? To what extent do you think it might sit within DSO and would you use CD ROMs or are there other technologies you’ve got in mind?
Goold:	I don’t have any specific ideas except that one of the things I’ve discovered in teaching through DSO is that it needs to be a seamless environment from the students’ point of view. So if you have something that is completely outside the DSO it is a problem for students. However, having used some of the tools and the technologies within DSO, I don’t believe that we can offer the sort of environment that I’m talking about with the DSO tools at the moment. So, yes, there needs to be some sort of a link within DSO to go out to this intranet or whatever else it is. We’ve talked about CD ROMs but the problem there is I think that it’s perhaps useful for static resources, for example, things that aren’t going to change within a year, but there has to be some sort of dynamic element to United Enterprises and that won’t be possible with a CD ROM. So looking at an intranet at the moment seems to be the way to go.
Inter:	That’s great and we look forward, I think, to whatever becomes of it. Thank you very much.
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