An Interview with Susie Groves
“Int” refers to Mary the interviewer and “RES” refers to the respondent Susie Groves
Int:	I am interviewing Associate Professor, Susie Groves, who is an academic in the Faculty of Education teaching mathematics education. She has recently developed a wholly online unit. Welcome.
RES:	Thanks Mary.
Int:	How would you describe your general philosophy of teaching and learning? And how have your views on this been shaped?
RES:	Well, I suppose you could give the sort of the trite answer of no, I adopt a constructivist view of learning and so on. And I suppose that’s true as well, but being a bit more specific about it, I think that it’s really important that we challenge our students, that they are really moved on from where they’re at. So I think it’s important that they’re engaged in the process of learning, that it’s through their own enquiry and, I think, that having discussions that are really going somewhere is really important. In terms of how my views have been shaped, I guess that’s a bit tricky. It’s not something I’ve really thought about in detail. I suppose my initial views were developed when I was actually doing my PhD in pure mathematics, or developed shortly after that when I came here 30 years ago now, and I really thought a lot about the way that mathematics is perceived in schools as being something that’s transmitted from the head of the teacher to the head of the student, or from the library or somewhere like that where students are passive participants. And this was totally in opposition to my experience from doing a doctorate in pure mathematics where you really see that mathematics is something that’s done, and is done by people. And that shaped my initial views and I suppose in more recent times the sort of research I’ve been involved in where I’ve been interested in things like communities of enquiry, which comes from the philosophy for children movement, and looking at ways that you can actually have what you might call progressive discourse, as in, moving the subject area forward in your classes.
Int:	All right. Now, in respect to your online unit, what deliberations led you to develop that?
RES:	As you are no doubt aware, the Vice Chancellor has decided that every undergraduate student at Deakin should do at least one unit in wholly online mode, and when this was first mooted, I think the faculty were a little bit concerned as to how we might do this because if you’re going to get a good unit up, it’s a lot of developmental costs and it’s a lot of resourcing and so on. And you wouldn’t want to be doing any units that are electives or, you know, taken by small numbers of students and then having to have lots and lots of those. And there wasn’t a great deal of enthusiasm amongst some people for doing this and I’d have to say I was one of them. The then Associate Dean for Teaching and Learning, [Marie Emmett], emailed me when I was actually in Hungary and said, ‘How about, for the secondary students, Numeracy Across the Curriculum being the wholly online unit?’ Now, I’d have to say that Numeracy Across the Curriculum is not a unit that is necessarily held in super high regard by a lot of our students. The background to the unit is that the national standards and guidelines for initial teacher training, for initial teacher education, they identified the need for graduates of secondary teaching courses to be able to effectively contribute to their students’ literacy and numeracy development in their own curriculum areas. And at that point, which was I think around about 1998 or 1999, I think we first introduced the unit Numeracy Across the Curriculum and Literacy Across the Curriculum to meet those needs. Sometimes it’s an uphill battle persuading teachers of dance or drama or physical education even (although they should be easily persuaded) or LOTE [Languages Other than English], that numeracy is something that is of deep concern to them. So this unit has been a challenge all the way through and when Marie suggested that we might make it the wholly online unit I contacted the other two people teaching in the area, one of whom had a very good background in IT sort of things and was very familiar with teaching in online mode. The other two of us not so. The first person left to go to a job at Monash and the other person immediately emailed back and said, no way. And that was what I emailed back, and I said, ‘No way, we’re not doing this. No way. And…
Int:	So this was a unit that had been offered on campus…
RES:	Yes.
Int:	Had it also been off campus?
RES:	No, no. No, it was a wholly…
Int:	Okay, so it went from a fully face-to-face unit to a wholly online unit?
RES:	That’s right. I’ll go back a step. Marie then sent around a general request for expressions of interest and didn’t get any, I don’t think. But Judy [Mousley] said, ‘obvious unit is Numeracy Across the Curriculum ’, and everyone started saying, ‘yes, yes, Numeracy Across the Curriculum is the unit we should have’. And that was everyone in our teaching group except us who were teaching it who were saying no, no, no. So after quite a bit of email discussion – I was in Japan by then, I thought I’d escaped this – we actually agreed to do it. And I’d have to say I’m really happy that we did agree to do it despite all sorts of things. So that was the deliberation that led us to develop a wholly online unit.
Int:	What are the components of the online environment that you’ve developed in terms of the content, communication, assessment and so on? And what was your rationale for each of them? Or the main components, let’s say.
RES:	Well, before, when we had a face-to-face, we had a print reader and so we cut down on the readings actually, but we retained some readings and we retained them in electronic form both on the library reserve and on what then became a CD-ROM that went to the students. The reason we produced the CD-ROM was not for the readings but because we actually thought that it would be really important to have some video exemplars because one of the problems we have is that basically Numeracy Across the Curriculum is all very well, but you don’t actually see a lot of it out there in schools. And so students’ experiences when they go out on teaching rounds is, well, it’s basically invisible. So what we did was we contacted a person, Grace Ciaravella, who had actually been on the Burwood staff teaching in SOSE [Studies of Society and Environment] but who was very interested in Numeracy Across the Curriculum herself and had a text book, a series of text books with a high numeracy content in SOSE and who knew people in the area who were working, who might have been potential people to go out and videotape. And we did manage to get a number videotaped. We are hoping to get a few more this year. We sort of ran out of time to get all the ones we wanted. So what we did was we went out to one school that specialises also in having V-CAL [Vic. Cet. of Applied Learning] to a large extent, and we videotaped a psychology lesson and numeracy lesson in V-CAL and in another school a Japanese lesson at Year 8. And we also had interviews with the teachers of those lessons about the numeracy component of their subject areas and also with career teachers and other teachers in those schools. Those interviews and those videos of the actual lessons which were edited down, you know, quite substantially, so the double lesson in psychology together with the interview is, like, about 30 minutes. So what we’ve got is - we’ve got a number of these interviews, some of them with lessons sort of edited down as part of those. And those are looking at mainly, looking at the numeracy demands across the curriculum and also looking at the sorts of strategies that these teachers might employ to meet the demands because that’s one of the foci of the unit is the numeracy demands and strategies to meet them across the curriculum. We also have another component in there which is looking at the professional numeracy demands for secondary teachers in terms of looking at the way the sort of data comes to them in schools and how important it is that they be able to interpret that data so that other people aren’t making all the decisions and making all the inferences on their behalf, but they’re actually empowered to do that. But also in terms of VCE because, of course, in Victoria we’ve got a fairly complex system of how enter scores are worked out, and Peter Hubber, who is one of the members of the team, had a lot of experience in schools where he found that people didn’t really understand the enter score system at all. And so we have another component there which deals with these students as professional teachers understanding the enter score. And so as part of that we had interviews with different people including Peter Stacey from La Trobe University, but he’s involved with VCA and the whole enter score system and talking about that. And then also Peter developed a powerpoint that he’d been using in lectures and turned that – that’s the only sort of lecture if you like that we’ve got in our course. So on the CD we’ve got videos, we’ve got interviews, we’ve got this powerpoint, this lecture slides if you like with a voiceover and we’ve got readings. So that’s one of the components. And the way that that’s built up is if you go into a discussion space or whatever and you need to access this, then it will say, ‘insert your CD’, to do that because, of course, downloading video is not really feasible especially from home. Now the other thing we’ve got is we’ve got a lot of discussions and we’ve got weekly activities, and the weekly activities are basically based around discussions so I would say that the major feature of the whole unit is discussion. Perhaps we went overboard with discussion looking at some of the students’ comments and it’s clear that we really have to streamline for next year the way that we did these discussions, because we had a number of different discussion threads going through in the tutorial groups. We had one which doesn’t seem to be entirely associated with Numeracy Across the Curriculum, but when we decided to go wholly online we thought that this was a really good opportunity for students to reflect on online learning. And Juli Lynch, who was our faculty’s online teaching fellow, who has been absolutely fantastic to work with – and she really is an expert on online learning, and so she ran that part of it. So we had a discussion space that was actually devoted to online learning, and part of the assessment was based on their reflections on that. And then we had other discussions based around things like numeracy in everyday life and critical numeracy, and then we had another one on the numeracy demands and strategies that I was talking about before and another one on the enter score and professional numeracy. And so the way that the unit was organised was that each week there would be usually a fairly short sort of introduction which might direct the students to some readings – what is numeracy was another one. And so then students were expected to do the reading or watch the interviews or watch the lessons and then engage in discussions within their tutorial groups. So in terms of assessment, we were fairly ambitious with our assessment and we probably got a couple of things wrong here I’d say, but I would still do the same sort of thing, but I think we have to get – there are a few little things that happened there. So in terms of assessment we had two assessment items that were worth 25% each and one that was worth 50 [%]. The first of the assessment items asked them to look at a unit of, or talk about one lesson in their own curriculum areas and to look at the numeracy demands that might be in that and some strategies that they could use to address those, which I would have thought was fairly straight forward, but in fact we realised after a while that you have to support the students in a somewhat different way than you might do in face-to-face. The second one was really challenging! We had a group assignment and, looking at the student responses, they’re not that keen on group assignments at the best of times. We had a group assignment with peer assessment. The students signed up and formed groups of four, and each group of four had to present a powerpoint or a website based on developing a Numeracy Across the Curriculum policy for a school, or a whole school policy on numeracy. And then when they submitted these, they were sent to another group for peer assessment as well as our assessment, which was quite challenging all around, but I think the major problem that we had was, we really needed to get them into their groups much earlier because what they did was they left it until very, very late to get started, much later than they wanted to – well, than we would have wanted them to. And therefore construed it that they had to do this assignment while they were on teaching rounds – well, they had to hand it in after teaching rounds, but they were meant to have done it before. So there were a lot of – yeah, it was very interesting. And the last item of assessment was a portfolio where they had to select some of their messages and other people’s messages from the various discussion spaces. They had to do it from the online learning discussion space and then they could choose two out of the other four, and do a fairly brief reflective piece on those discussions supported by messages from the discussion spaces, their own and others.
Int:	And how much of the assessment was actually submitted online?
RES:	All of it.
Int:	All of it. Okay…Did you want to talk a little bit about the rationale for what you did online? And also maybe in the same breath, you know, what design factors you had to consider when you were putting all of this stuff together.
RES:	Yeah, the course, because it grew from the face-to-face one – so we wanted to keep the critical parts of the content and the things which had been part of the assessment, but we also wanted to add new things like the online learning component. We have to find a better way of persuading the students why it’s there in the future because it seems quite obvious to us, while it’s not part of the Numeracy Across the Curriculum, but this is their one opportunity to actually reflect on this online learning and there are people who are going to be teachers. So the online learning was there for that reason, not having previously been part of it. In terms of the rationale, I suppose, I think having video of classrooms is a very powerful thing. [We’ve] done a lot of research where we’ve used video in classrooms and you are always struck by how powerful it is and what it tells you that you can’t tell people otherwise. So to me this is a huge plus in online learning, that you actually – we have the resources to go out and produce this type of video and to be able to use it relatively easily. Most of the students could access it quite well. Not all of them, but most of them could. In terms of having the interviews, it was really good to have real teachers speaking about what they were doing rather than us trying to tell them. And in terms of the discussion, I suppose, that goes back to the sort of things I was saying before when you asked me about my general philosophy of teaching and learning. And I think it was very interesting looking at the discussion. So I think it was very good looking at those discussions and I think that all of the staff teaching it were struck by the quality of a lot of the responses. Not all of them, but a lot of the responses. And basically the level of work was, we all agreed, was of a much higher standard than when it was face-to-face because the students, in order to make their online contributions, most of them felt that they had to do the reading or look at the video or whatever, unlike coming to tutes where okay, you haven’t done it, you just hope no one looks at you and you can …
Int:	You can hide in the back seat or something.
RES:	Yeah, they could still hide in the backseat a bit because we didn’t sort of keep a check of who was doing the contributions and it was quite clear when you read their final assignment how some students hadn’t read anything. But by and large the standard of work was much higher, I think. And so I think having those discussion spaces was really good because it also let us stand back, and so when you’d have students who would make… say well, ‘actually there’s no numeracy in phys ed’ and someone else would say, ‘oh yes there is, how can you say that because look at this, this and this’. So you had – the discussion was really happening much more between the students and you didn’t feel that you had to sort of constantly be the person that’s putting in the bit about well, yes it is. So the rationale about the assessment, well, I think we clearly wanted them to do something related to a unit of work, but the whole school approach to numeracy and having a group assignment with a PowerPoint – although I’m not personally necessarily a huge fan of group assignments, I think that on this occasion it’s really important because what we’re trying to say to the students is, ‘okay, you’re going to go out in to schools and you have your own discipline areas, your own curriculum areas, but it’s going to be really important to interact with people from other areas. And so these groups were meant to be interdisciplinary, across discipline areas. So you had to work with people from other curriculum areas in this, and this is the sort of thing that would exactly happen to you when you go out to a school. You’d be asked to be on some committee and come up with a policy or whatever. So we were really trying to mirror what would happen to them when they’re out in schools as teachers.
Int:	Okay, you’ve touched on the role of multimedia in the unit. Is it possible for you to say in what ways the multimedia helped students learn better?
RES:	I think they really liked the videos. A lot of students commented that they would like more of them, and I’m hoping we’ll be able to have some more of them. That – actually seeing it in practice, which is what you can’t do because you can’t select when you’re out of teaching rounds that something’s actually going to focus on the thing that you particularly want. So I’ve always been a big fan of video. Of course you can use video in your lectures and things like that, and I do a lot of the time, but also…
Int:	Did you have exemplars before the development of the online unit?
RES:	No. Not for this we didn’t because it’s actually quite hard to get the resources to produce these things. So that was really important.
Int:	So having the resources for development of an online unit gave you the opportunity?
RES:	It did. And also because we had transcripts to go with the videos so it allows the students to go back and look at them over again if they want to and access them. They really like the videos and they really like the interviews. And I think because there weren’t too many of them and they weren’t too long – it’s a real problem if you’re trying to watch long videos.
Int:	Yes. I wonder whether you could just talk a little bit now about what your expectations were in respect to the unit and what the experiences were.
RES:	Survival was our expectation, hopefully.
Int:	Let’s say, what were your expectations in respect to the real teaching and learning stuff?
RES:	Well, we had resources and we had quite a lot of resources, and we had monetary resources as well, but in fact the everyday, I mean your everyday life, you actually can’t buy out yourself because yourself is needed for other things and because we were always really pushing the time lines, but we made it on every one of them in the end, don’t know how. I have to thank everyone at Learning Services, particularly David owies who was just magnificent in his support. But our expectations were that hopefully this was going to be really good and it was going to be better than our face-to-face. And I think it was. Don’t know about really good, but it was better than our face-to-face. Yeah, I don’t know quite what expectations. I think our expectations were that there would be a lot of problems. We asked the students – I asked the students last year, at the end of the year I said to them, ‘well, next year this unit’s going to be offered wholly online, what do you think?’ I don’t think I can say the word here that resounded in the room, and I think that the students had a lot of expectations and in fact some of them wrote this, but then they said this is not what happened. But they have a lot of expectations that this is basically a cost cutting measure from the university that by having it wholly online, this is just going to save a whole lot of money, but I think a whole lot of students realised that that was absolutely the opposite of the case and …
Int:	You mentioned that you thought that the students’ performance, or their work level, was better than it had been. Can you speak a little bit …?
RES:	That’s absolutely clear, I think.
Int:	Okay, can you talk a little bit more about that and other kinds of experiences that you think might have improved learning? What was it that caused their work to be of a higher standard?
RES:	By and large it was because, (a) they’d read the readings, but they actually had to engage with them. And I suppose one of their major criticisms of online learning is the lack of immediacy, but on the other hand that was actually a big advantage as well, because it allowed for people to reflect on things and it allowed them to come back to it and the discussion didn’t just disappear. And so for many of them, I’m not saying for all of them, it was over a much more extended period of time and that’s what a lot of them hated, but I think they’re sort of hating that because you can walk into a class, have the discussion, you’re out of there and it’s finished, you know. But I think the level of discussion was really good, and people – because it was there and you could access other people’s comments and other people’s resources – for example, we also had discussion spaces for different curriculum areas, and the people in the Arts, and there weren’t that many of them, but the people in the Arts areas found some wonderful websites which they shared with one another. I don’t want to say this but the people in phys ed just chatted. They kept saying how they had the largest number of discussions in their area, but most of them were not about the unit.
Int:	Chit chat!
RES:	Or if they were, they weren’t exactly useful. And I actually think phys ed students are really great so I don’t want to say that, but - but the Arts people found wonderful websites and they shared it amongst one another, which is something that they probably wouldn’t have done in other ways. The PowerPoint or web presentations were really outstanding. When you asked was everything submitted online, well, we had four people who produced video and couldn’t therefore submit it online because of [streaming] problems and had CDs which we had enormous problems with as well, and we had a lot of problems circulating those for peer evaluation. But it all worked out more or less in the end. But the CDs they produced were just amazing, but other people too produced amazing websites and the PowerPoints were by and large really good, much better than we’ve had in the past despite all the difficulties they had of finding the time.
Int:	So would you say by and large that some of the earlier expectations were negated, I guess, by experiences?
RES:	I’d say that the students went into it by and large very, very negative about doing it online. For quite a few of them that changed. For quite a lot of them, it didn’t. I mean, I suppose the thing that really stunned me was that assignment 1, which was our first thing to be submitted online, was due on a Monday. The Wednesday before, ITS said they were having a total shutdown for 10 hours on Saturday, ‘would this bother anyone’? And we said, ‘well, yes’! So they changed it to two shut downs on, of five hours on the Sunday, so that was all right, but Thursday the whole of DSO went down. Friday, at least 10% or more of the students couldn’t get onto DSO because they’d been barred because they had either not paid their general services fee or they had, but they were having disputes. So now we’re up to Saturday and Sunday. Anyway, comes Monday and they’d done the repairs over the weekend, so all these people who could previously attach attachments no longer could.
Int:	Oh dear. So what did you do about this?
RES:	Well, it was okay. We all kept smiling, but we did have quite a lot of really serious problems.
Int:	Interruptions.
RES:	Well, just huge issues with DSO, the students and us. But what I’m trying to say is, despite that, I think we only ended up with maybe five hard copy assignments.
Int:	That’s pretty good going, isn’t it?
RES:	Okay, so we had a lot of people who emailed them, but we finally figured out how to send them back via the grade book and everything, but yeah so...
Int:	All right, Susie, are there any other comments you’d like to make about online teaching and learning?
RES:	Oh, there’s a few things. I think the really interesting thing was how, despite all the difficulties with DSO, which I could spend several hours telling you about, but I won’t, despite all those difficulties, I think everyone was smiling at the end. I don’t know about the students, but they more or less appeared to be. Not when you hear about it afterwards, but at the time, they managed to do the work, they managed to hand things in. I think that everyone had, personally, a huge learning curve. I’m really glad I did it. I don’t ever want to do it like that again. I don’t want to spend at least three nights a week working on DSO on this unit until one or two or later in the morning.
Int:	And that’s what you were doing, was it?
RES:	That is what I was doing. I don’t want to do that again thanks. So we’ll be better organised next time, but I think Learning Services were tremendous at every point. Having Juli as our online fellow was just fantastic because – I should also say I’ve got no real experience in online teaching, but …
Int:	Now you do have.
RES:	Now I do have, yes. But working with Juli was fantastic and having a lot of can-do people around. I think it’s been a really interesting experience. We’ll just have to do it better next time.
Int:	And I’m sure you will. Thanks, Susie, very much.
RES:	Thanks Mary.
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