Interview with Peter Haeusler
“Int” refers to the interviewer and “PH” refers to Peter Haeusler
Int:	I am interviewing Peter Haeusler who is a Lecturer in Politics in the Faculty of Arts. We are talking in particular about project based learning in his subject area of politics. Peter, how would describe your philosophy of teaching and learning and how do you think your views on this have been shaped?
PH:	My views now as they stand… I approach the learning from a point of view… we are dealing here with the construction of knowledge. For me with students, how I teach, how I seek to engage them in the whole teaching and learning process is very much predicated on the idea that knowledge is constructed and for me as a teacher it is then constructed in dialogue, in discussion, in debate and in critical reflection with students. It is not scholarly teaching, which when I look back on my own experience as an undergraduate, which is not far behind me because I came through as a mature age student, there you were given great long reading lists which went for pages and pages and you would scrupulously write down everything the lecturer gave you. That sort of approach is often too much about the lecturer as the superior person in the relationship imparting knowledge to the students. For very good students that can still work. For average students that can be quite intimidating at times. It leaves them in a rather dependent relationship, almost passive. My view is increasingly that the challenge here is to convey to students that they can and should be contributing here to the knowledge, to the issues we are exploring. Particularly as a politics' subject, politics is to me an essentially contested domain. It is where we come together and explore the ideas and values. At the same time, my experience having worked in the public sector for many years, come to tertiary education with that behind me, very much aware of the need to engage students in real world issues. It is fine having broader abstract debates but again, if one thinks where the average student is at, the broad cohort, when you can pin larger ideas down into day to day issues and use those to help unpack them, that is also very important. Student learning has to be this form of engagement but it also needs to experiential, that can obviously mean many different things. That is very important, that is part of engaging them today, that they can see that it is relevant, that they can contribute in a worthwhile way. They don't know this. Instead of them thinking what they don't know, this is what I find with first year students, they seem to be so conscious of what they don't know about the political system, that it leaves them sitting back there waiting for you to tell them these things, when you want them to come forward and engage with you and explore these issues because to me, that's politics. As part of this experiential approach, we talk a lot about self directed learners and I think this approach is trying to go further down that path. None of us are dealing with a level playing field. It is alright to pick up the textbooks, the books on philosophy of teaching, but the fact is, we have this very uneven terrain we are working with. The student cohort is quite diverse. Twenty years ago we might have looked at a group of white Anglo looking students and thought “I can treat them as a kind”, that is less and less the case and now more so of course as we get international students in our classes. There is great diversity there and I think the challenge is to move them then to account for that diversity to bring it…and a subject like politics you can bring it to contribute to the discussion in at times, quite exciting ways.
Int:	With the politics unit, what has been your rationale for developing online components that go along with the face to face part of the unit?
PH:	That we can, and particularly with the young students coming through… they are used to… their life incorporates technology in many different forms using multimedia. They have grown up exposed to this. This is how they learn and they can learn very rapidly in these very rich environments. I think sometimes in the tertiary sector, we have been rather slow and I think politics discipline is one of the slower ones as well. Rather slow to respond to this situation. Online helps us address several issues here. One, is the issue of engaging students. To provide potentially much richer learning environment and also to move, in terms of politics, to move beyond a lot of the stereotypes. One of the challenges you face with students these days is very narrow conceptions of what politics is about. The cut and thrust of gladiatorial contests in the parliament, so you are trying to move beyond that for them to think much more widely about politics and how it is played out and what it means. Online, because you have got these different forms of knowledge you can bring together here, allows for a potentially much richer environment. And at the same time, a deeper learning environment. This is one of the real challenges. To move beyond this rote learning, this top down approach, very formalistic approach to learning, to a much richer one with a form of learning that I was talking about earlier. Online offers great possibilities there. It also allows us to integrate on and off campus. I have always been troubled by the fact that I have to here separate my on and off campus when I know often that my off campus students will bring different experiences to the unit. Here, if you can break down that barrier, that is to the benefit of all students, because you get very different perspectives, younger, older students, students from different cultural experiences. That is very important there. Another big advantage in online is that you can be much more responsive. One of the challenges we have is for all of our students and off campus in particular, is to be much more responsive to them. So when they are working on assignments which are just not this sort of summative thing that you have at the end, but part of the learning experience. That you can give them timely feedback, not feedback that literally so much of it tends to come at the end of semester once it is all added up. Online has enormous potential there.
Int:	When you were creating the unit, what were the design considerations, particularly in respect to the online components, but also in terms of the integration between that and the face to face classes?
PH:	It needs to have appeal. It needs to look like an organic entity. Again, like the very knowledge that we are exploring. It needs to look like this living thing, not just a massive noticeboard. It has to accessible. The two tend to go together obviously. The average student faces a huge learning curve when they come to somewhere like Deakin where we have a strong, increasing emphasis on online. You need to be very mindful of that and that they can be intimidated by it. So it needs to be constructed in a way that is not too complicated, is open and inviting but also looks as if it is a living entity. Another design consideration here is the simple, technical capabilities of the system. These can be real limitations just as copyright can as well. It is not a complete level playing field. You are trying to negotiate your way around these. We are not talking about technical capabilities. For instance, in streaming small video clips, you have to be very mindful of the fact that a lot of students may not have good access to this sort of facility. The use of online here is integral to the teaching and learning experience but it doesn't overtake the whole thing. We have to be very careful that at the end of the day the technology does not start driving it. There is a lot you can do, you are picking certain things. My focus so far with online has very much been on project based assessment and going down that path, but there are many other things you can do.
Int:	To carry on this conversation about project based assessment Peter, can you explain how you developed that and also how you used the online environment to facilitate it?
PH:	We seem to have put a huge premium on essays as the penultimate form of learning or gauging student learning. That is valuable to some extent but it doesn't necessarily produce the deeper learning that we want nor that more empowered self directed form of learning. Project based assessment, as part of the overall different forms of assessment has some real advantages. It encourages a much deeper form of learning. I certainly think that has been the case with the results that I see in students' work this semester for example. It also allows us to move towards a more genuine form of collaborative learning. What I am trying to do is move students, that they have to work on a very large project as teams and so this is a much larger level of engagement and commitment to working with other students. So many of them, when they get out into the real world of work, are going to be faced with doing precisely this. Working on, not little essays where they are given a topic and say write on this, they will be given rather a brief and say go and explore this. A lot of the students who come through our area will have to explore this, unpack the issues and prepare papers on that. They will almost invariably have to do that in team type situations. There are a lot of skills there that I think we haven't necessarily worked on enough. The other reason for moving with projects is… I have been struck with first year students… that I think… one of the challenges or one of the stumbling blocks for them has not been the will, but often the skills in terms of unpacking a project and managing it. Unpacking its elements. Again, this is a different sort of learning and what a lot of them have had is a fair bit of potted learning. I was struck by the fact that with first year students and particularly when I started implementing a project based assessment there, that there were real hurdles there that I hadn't quite appreciated and that students who were trying and putting in the effort were still not getting anywhere near what I felt was their full potential.
Int:	I would like you to elaborate on the stages that you go through in the project…
PH:	The situation with the unit now, with Managing Global Risk, set three simple online tasks. Students are given an extensive brief on a project that they have to fashion. They are given a lot of latitude in the area they look at and it has to engage with… it is essentially a case study that they have to undertake in the area of risk, which as a case study is not only an empirical study but then has to speak back to some of the broader themes in the unit. Here they are learning not only about projects in that broad sense, or what is a case study. In terms of providing them with support there are broader documents that are selectively released online, through DSO, for instance, 'What is a Case Study?', a document on that. My approach here has been teaching the unit more generally and particularly where the major project is concerned, has been the selective release of material or selective provision of it. That is to say a more timely release of it, rather than putting it all upfront, I think that is a problem. When you talk to students about this and the rationale for doing this, they are nodding quite furiously because they know, they literally get buried in information. We need a bit more of this just in time production. That is one of the huge advantages of online, is that you can… you don't have to stick it upfront and with the result that it almost gets buried. You can be assured that the chances of the student reading it are inversely related to the volume that you have got up there. So with the major project then, there are supporting documents, resources that are put up there in selected folders, online resources, print resources. I will just talk a bit about the broader framework for the moment. This year we have moved to provision of certain video material. Again I have found that using video material in tutorials is great for students, it is a great primer. You can have them read an article on pesticides or any one of a number of issues, they can wade through that article, it can be one of the best you have found, getting a discussion going about that and then getting a recall of that months later, or weeks later can be very difficult. Show them a very good video and have some discussion about it and you find the recall on that is amazing compared with this. This year I have put more emphasis on video and again this is where…something like increasing use of online enables you to give this to off campus as well as on campus. Larger videos or full length videos are anything from 15 minutes to 45 minutes we put on a CD. Smaller clips which are part of a media library facility, very short clips, which are there to stimulate students' thinking about projects. We have been able to stream through DSO. They have had to be very short. This goes back to the issue I raised before about the technical capabilities that students might have at their fingertips, not when they are at university, but for those when they are working from home. That technology no doubt is going to get better and we will be able to provide them with more. At the moment we have had to provide them with very short grabs. The rationale for that was, I found last year and the first year where I was trialling this in global risk, I could see the video material was working well, but I was also rather struck by the fact that when they were given this brief about “develop a case study in an area of risk”, so this might be health related risk, environmental, economic security, surveillance related. Some had a very good sense of where they wanted to go, very focused. I was really struck by the number who were totally at sea, swimming around and didn't know. One of the things that there are… you can give them the print resources but from my experience, video material works far better. This was one of the reasons this year in working more on providing a CD plus the video, the small clips. The idea is, they have a project, part of the way of supporting that is to provide a more stimulating environment in the first place. To help get them thinking and moving along with these issues. That is the broader background to the project and they have the online resources, the print resources, the websites. We annotate the websites, I don't see any point in listing a whole lot of websites. The emphasis is on quality of information rather than quantity. With the project itself, given the original specifications, they have as part of the assessment prior to that, an essay which gets them into the more conceptual part of the material. Bear in mind they will have done that and got to a certain point. Now they have to develop this project. This is at a point in the unit where we are starting to look at different cases as well, as part of the lecture and tutorial program. With the project, essentially there are three tasks that they all undertake whether on or off campus. The first one is the project specification. Alright.
Int:	They undertake these tasks online?
PH:	Yes, these have to be submitted online. The beauty of that is I can give them quick feedback. They have a certain deadline and then I undertake to give them feedback within a week. Again you are treating on and off campus the same. They put in the project specifications as the first task. If they are working in a team, I have left teams as optional, I haven't mandated them. The second one is a table of contents, for want of a better term. The idea of that is to ensure that by the next point in semester that they have got to a certain stage where they can realise the elements of their project. What are the different components of this project, how do I see it all sitting together? They submit that and then the final piece of work is an interim executive summary. The deadline is two weeks before the major assignment is due and that is telling you what their major findings are. What we have looked at, what the major findings are and again the given document is available through the unit site which tells them what is expected, what an executive summary is like. Again this is a common sort of thing you will find in reports and case studies, is that someone will provide an executive summary of some sort. The difference here in this case is they put that in and again you give them feedback on that through DSO.
Int:	You have already touched on quite a few of your experiences and the students' experiences, can you comment on the overall feeling about the unit from both the staff and students' point of view, and also how they were able to move between face to face and online environments?
PH:	I find it's very demanding because you are not just dealing with an essay at the end. You are having to think about the proposal, think seriously, even it is only a 250 word proposal, you can spend quite a bit of time thinking about it and the best advice you can give to students. It is time consuming, there is no doubt about that. You are juggling that with commitments and deadlines in other units and conferences and semester break. All of that is very demanding. The other thing I found as a teacher is you become more aware of students who are really engaged with the unit and those who are not. If you just give them lectures, tutes, conventional print materials, you know who are contributing in tutes and some can flum their way through a tute even if they haven't done reading and we all know that getting students to do sufficient or quality reading is always a challenge. Once you start to do more online you can see in terms of accessing the unit reports on who is accessing, but I tend not to use those because I don't want to start policing. What I have tried to do with the way I have integrated online with more conventional forms of teaching and learning is to provide opportunities here for students to go in and make the most of this environment. You do get a sense of the fact that some students are deeply engaged with the unit, are drawing on different materials, can talk to you about, they know what has been happening online, they know what notices you have put up, they can see where you have changed things or added material and they may engage in online discussion as well. Then you get others who are barely aware of a lot of these things. It is quite astonishing and you would not become aware to the same extent, you only become aware when an essay is due in and they are asking you for an extension or you know that it is two weeks after the due date and you haven't seen it. So in some ways online makes you more aware, for better or worse, of the diversity of your cohort and where they are at and not at. There are pluses and minuses there but you can certainly see, and I have had very favourable feedback from students who really appreciate the extra support. It doesn't have to be you necessarily talking to them there, but the resources, the way materials are structured and available to help guide them through the unit, that they can make more out of it. In some ways, those who want to engage with the material, there is more there for them to do. That is talking about the students experiences at the other end of the spectrum. These are very diverse. Last year, because we were running with DSO for the first time, we experienced quite a few technical problems and quite a bit of student resistance. I had off campus students say to me, as a badge of honour “I've been studying off campus for years and I've never had to talk to a lecturer or tutor and I don't see why I should have to now”. But I think in terms of learner experiences here, this year then I detect a real difference. We have had far fewer of the technical problems that we had last year, it ran remarkably well for me this year, so I think these things will get better. The student resistance, this is because a minimal level of DSO, DSO level 1 has been mandated now, so this is a fact of life, it is part of the learning environment. All students are coming to you, instead of having a large number of your students coming who have never done anything online other than do a search through the library for resources, you have got students for whom it is now part, even a small part, it has been part of their learning experience. We are very rapidly breaking down that resistance and that has made my job much easier, but it is making the learning experience more enjoyable for students. We have certainly had very positive comments from students on and off, about the level of support that is effectively provided here and the different forms of… the integration with video material and discussion as well. I think off campus students in particular appreciate being able to get the feedback on projects, the work in progress. For them that is something they don't normally get, they appreciate that. It helps them, no doubt, develop better projects. I look at the feedback I give them and I thought, had they just given me a project and hadn't had some interim feedback, they would be making some serious mistakes and particularly not doing enough on extending the analysis in a case study, moving beyond description. I find there are certain recurring themes, one ends up giving them as feedback.
Int:	How well do you believe students respond to your feedback?
PH:	Some do not, but I think this is no different to feedback through conventional modes. Some who only want to see the grade on their essay, some who never pick up their essays from the General Office. They do take on board…I can see in terms of the initial feedback I have given them and then the end product. You can see a real effort. We were very impressed this year with the quality of the case studies. Some of them were the best I have ever seen. We had some that we gave marks in the 90s to and this is very rare. If you are looking at the end product, we were very impressed, Geelong, Burwood and off campus with the quality of them. There was some real depth at the top, this time that we haven't had. Sure, there were some very poor ones, quite minimal effort, but there was undoubtedly more depth at the top and they were doing more. They had moved beyond very good descriptive projects to much more analytic pieces. Like all things, it is about the balanced integration, at the end of the day. It is not a great panacea, it can be a lot more demanding. We are all on a huge learning curve in terms of possibilities and as a lecturer you need to make choices. You can't try to do everything. I haven't gone into role plays and chat a lot, we did use the discussion facility more this year with third level students responsible for facilitating discussion once during semester. We had several students facilitating in a given week. That worked remarkably well, better often than lecturers. Again it comes back to students, those who are using their language more so than someone who has been an academic for a number of years. Students who are using their language, they talk to each other more readily and I think a lot of the video material does that. One lesson, you need to choose. You've got to say “this unit I am particularly working on these sorts of skills” and we have a given domain that we are looking at in this case, these debates around risk society and globalisation of risk but within that I am going to incorporate online and have certain goals in that teaching learning experience and for me it is primarily about project based, primarily about getting students to work more collaboratively in that environment. I think you have to choose, you will kill yourself if you try and keep everything going wonderfully because there are many different things you can do, many different ways of incorporating online and using the facilities that are available. Trying to take more account of where students are at and the pressures on them and how we can better facilitate the learning experience there. This is partly where the project steps are trying to address those constraints as well as possibilities. That is very important. We know the constraints we face. Sometimes we tend to be overly critical of students, students work. They work such long hours, they are not putting in time. I think we need to move a bit beyond that and say they have certain constraints, how do we work around that, how do we develop teaching and assessment that is integral to that in a way that takes better account of those realities. The other thing that is important is assessment. What online is allowing me to do here in a way that traditional modes, particularly with off campus, but also with on, don't allow so well or don't facilitate so well, is the integration of assessment, deeply embedding it into the learning experience in an ongoing sense. I think there is too much of let's … you know… so many pieces of work become due near the end of semester and it is very much this summative approach that… assessment is used to gauge how well they have done and what they have learnt, rather than seeing these pieces of assessment as integral to the learning experience and an ongoing part.
Int:	Although you don't mandate collaborative group work, could you talk about your experience with it, in terms of advantages and disadvantages?
PH:	Yes, I haven't mandated it. I have a colleague who mandated it and immediately spent half the semester dealing with student resistance to it and those problems. So it is not that I am being a coward or taking the easy way out here, what I hoped for with a lot of what I have done, is to show students the possibilities and hoping in an overly optimistic view at times, that they will see the benefits and engage with that, because you can't force students to do these sort of things. Where students work collaboratively, this is much more like the real world of work, but they can also bounce ideas off one another and it makes for a much potentially deeper learning experience because it is a way of them putting pressure on each other to meet deadlines. They bounce ideas off one another and discuss it and I find where they work in groups, they tend to become much more engaged. I have also found that students who do work in groups generally get a better result on their final end product. For example, a student who on a more conceptual shorter essay might be around the high credit mark, when they have worked collaboratively on a project they will pick their grade up. Students who do well in the minor essay, will still do well. Where I find collaboration works better is for the average, average plus student, in a collaborative environment will, almost without exception, lift their performance. The problem with collaboration, and this year I have to say I didn't push it as much as last year, what I found was, that students… and this is part of my own learning experience here, last year, when about 80% of the students worked collaboratively, and we had some very interesting teams, we had students… Burwood, Geelong students working together, on and off campus students working together and we had a couple of cases of on and off campus working together and then on campus working together this year, but last year it was much more extensive. Last year we also had more problems because… it was my first experience of really going down that path of collaborative learning. What I found was that students really underestimated the commitment that was involved. I talked to people who had written about and had experience with collaborative work and had certain guidelines, now bear in mind, sort of thing, this is demanding, you will need to work out a division of labour and time management, but I think most of them glossed over that. Some worked very well, some really came unstuck because they were not…because of work commitments they were not getting together, they were making arrangements and then one was called into work, and then they couldn't meet, then it happened again the next week. Some were getting quite impatient and there was a degree of friction in the groups. This of course is part of life, this is what happens when you are working in group environments in the real world, but students are not used to it and they become… here in this case they had made a choice, but it did create some difficulties. What I do ask students to do is online, those who work in groups, give me a brief report on how they felt the group work went. I haven't looked at this year's yet, but there weren't as many. But last year some were very critical of it but others were very praiseworthy of it. You have the spectrum… this year I made sure they were more informed and I was more informed about the potential pitfalls. I would like to see all students working in groups. I am loath to mandate it because you have already got a lot of challenges, you could be biting off more challenges and a degree of resistance. Also you have constraints that I have no control over. The fact that they are all working or most of them are working often very long hours, and if you start mandating groups for something that extends over a large part of semester, more than half the semester, you can be presenting students with huge obstacles, so you have got to be careful. I would still prefer to stick with the voluntary path and put more emphasis on at least the deeper learning they get through projects.
Int:	How would you like to further develop your teaching and learning materials, particularly in this unit in the future?
PH:	One of the challenges in this unit, which really doesn't bear on the extent to which I am using online, is simply that it is a unit which sits at the base of the junction of some very large debates. It is about the risk and globalisation of risk and very much about the different forms of knowledge, the privileging of expert knowledge, so you are getting into the role of science and scientific knowledge as against the lay person and whether the lay person, to what extent their views need to be taken account of, and this is where the unit very much explores, apart from the actual issue areas, it is exploring these fundamental debates about different forms of knowledge and whether, if people perceive a risk as such, whether they might have valid insights that the scientific community should take account off. One of the challenges for me in a twelve week semester is to try and get across this, that you don't lose the students. I don't want them just undertaking a case study, I want them to put it back in this larger social and cultural context. I have still got to find a way of cutting through those most effectively, that you don't short cut through them, that provides them with an adequate foundation to then undertake these case studies. I know this is a very big ask. Academics, despite what they might say, many of them still tend to work at a more empirical level or a more theoretical level and to bring the two together is very challenging. I say this to the students “I know this is a big ask”, but I think they have responded remarkably well. I still think that is a challenge for me to work out how to best cut through and deliver this material to the students and these very large debates. We have made a number of steps this year with incorporating the video material. I would like to improve the material on CD, then we can make links from DSO straight to the video. I would hope once the technological capabilities as such, we can stream larger segments. I am looking forward to those sort of developments. I have had very good support from the audio visual people here this year and am really looking forward to the way we can improve that part of it. The other challenge still remains the collaborative learning side. I am very keen on that but there are structural impediments here that we are trying to grapple with.
Int:	Thanks very much for your time Peter.
PH:	Okay, thank you.
	close this window