An Interview with Bev Jackling
“Int” refers to the interviewer and “Jackling” refers to Bev Jackling
Int:	How would you describe your philosophy of teaching and learning and how have your views on these been shaped?
Jackling:	Pam, thanks for the invitation to do this, firstly. In terms of philosophy in teaching accounting, I guess my view is that accounting students need to be able to be developed as independent learners with knowledge, skills and competencies that enable them to enter the workforce as accountants or going to be accountants but to perform effectively in their careers ultimately. And I believe in terms of, they’re sort of the teaching outcomes but in teaching students I believe that we really do need to shape students’ understanding of concepts. If we are able to do that in our teaching then I think we have achieved something. How have my views been shaped? Well, I suppose they’ve been shaped over many years of teaching and also my own studies, I’ve got a PhD in education so I’ve been particularly interested in learning approaches of students.
Int:	When we come to MAA203 [Accounting Concepts and Systems], how long have you been unit chair of MAA203 and could you please provide an overview of the unit, the cohorts, the teachers and the practices that you employ?
Jackling:	Well, MAA203 was, replaced former unit MAA102 when we used to have two units in the core in the Bachelor of Commerce so this unit replaced 102. It’s now become the second unit in the accounting major so the only students that do MAA203 are those that are possibly seeking to do an accounting major and we’ve run this unit for about 4 or 5 years now, I expect. The cohorts of students we’ve run in the main semester which is first semester, we have run the unit on 3 campuses, on campus and also off campus. In the second semester we’ve run it on campus at Burwood and off campus as well. The teachers, we have academics teaching the unit face to face and we tended to have a sessional staff member taking the off campus unit although that’s changing now as we’ve got more academics on board. The way we go about teaching it is that we have a 2 hour lecture and a 1 hour tutorial and I guess that leads into the structure that we’ve developed. We’ve had available to us over a number of years since the mid 1990’s, computer assisted learning packages that were developed by Deakin academics but when we used those in our courses we found that we asked students to use them out of class in their own time and our experience was that students didn’t use them unless they had to use them for an assessment task. We also felt that we wanted to engage students more with the learning environment and so in the last couple of years we’ve replaced some of the tutorials for 4 weeks with computer lab sessions so instead of doing the traditional 1 hour tutorial they do a 1 hour lab session. And the idea of that was really to get students to engage more with our educational environment and also for us to interact with them because it’s more a one to one environment when they are in the classroom. They have to engage with the computer, if they’ve got issues that they need to ask the lecturer or the tutor about those. So those computer lab sessions were run for on campus students on the three campuses and the off campus students obviously they didn’t have a set lab time but they were expected to work with those packages in their own time. So that’s basically the program and how we’ve run it in that time.
Int:	Thank you. When it comes, now turning here to the focus of assessment for using these packages, what was the rationale for using Quickbooks for online assessment and how did you envisage assessing the use of this?
Jackling:	One thing perhaps I’ll just come back to. When we decided to use these computer assisted learning packages, the other thing that we came to the realisation post GST which was introduced in 2000, was that any recording and accounting was now done by computer because even your small business person now used one of the accounting packages because they have to produce a statement for tax purposes and these packages, such as Quickbooks and Mind Your Own Business MYOB, they provided a very good way for small businesses uses. So we felt that we, our students really needed to have some awareness of these packages together with the computer assisted learning packages, we decided to introduce Quickbooks. Immediately we went to Quickbooks we felt that, or we knew we had issues before with students doing the computer assisted learning packages, the assessments, we wanted the students to do them by themselves to test their understanding of the concepts but, in fact, they were doing together and some of them were manufacturing the results. In fact, you could say there was cheating. So when it came to Quickbooks, the suggestion was from the Quickbooks’ representatives, that we have an assignment and the immediate reaction was, oh the students will all just all copy so we won’t. What’s the point marking an assignment where it’s a community effort when we want to test the individual understanding of students. So that was really the impetus for doing the Quickbook test. So, I must say Quickbooks Educational Manager has been very helpful because they actually designed the test for us and worked with the faculty to make that suitable for online testing.
Int:	In respect to the integration of DSO to deliver the assessment and the use of OSCAR [Online Student Class Allocation and Registration] to lock the students into class lists or exam groups really, what was your experience of all this because you really were the first unit to actually pull together some of these disparate administrative and delivery systems to achieve the results you desired, which was to individualise those assessments?
Jackling:	The Quickbooks test came after the four weeks of lab sessions so they had it pretty much the week following but we couldn’t run the test in those tutorial times, we had to book some other computer lab times to do the test because we hadn’t even gone back to our tutorials. So, yes we were, I think, the first ones to use OSCAR for the students to actually enrol in the test time. So we had on the Burwood campus, for example, we had 400 students approximately and we had some computer labs allocated to us between 4:00 and 7:00 p.m. and so we might have five labs at 4 o’clock, another six at 5 o’clock, so it was a one hour test so we wanted to have the students. Now traditionally we’d have students just sign up on pieces of paper which was very cumbersome because some students would cross out other people’s name and put their name in, others would forget to do it, so the idea of using OSCAR for the enrolment in the test time, so if you wanted to do the test at 7 o’clock then you could enrol on OSCAR at 7:00. So, I’d say overall the enrolment using OSCAR was great because it took a lot the administrative work away from us and the students could select the times that they wanted and we were able to put the onus on the student to enrol at the appropriate time. It did have some quirks to it. One of the things that we did discover was that some students thought that, they hadn’t enrolled for the 4 o’clock lab test, they thought that they could just front up and, of course, they went into the computer lab and the selective release would be only to their ID’s so they suddenly found that they really did have to follow the system and they couldn’t just butt in because they’d changed their mind. So, that was interesting to see students actually having to follow a set of instructions and do the right thing. The other thing which I had mentioned before is that in doing this we became default debt collectors for the university in that that we found that students couldn’t do the test because some of them had outstanding debts with the university. And so there was an added difficulty and so, you know, we’ve sort of, by having to do the test, we actually, they actually paid up their library fines or their outstanding fees, whatever. So we became default debt collectors there. The other thing that we did notice in using the system, perhaps this is more with DSO, is that some of the students weren’t very good at using DSO. And although every student is expected to have a working knowledge of it, there were a few that really weren’t very knowledgeable at all and that was really highlighted when they did the test of that, they didn’t – but the other thing that we noted and it was something perhaps, we had a backup. If the system failed at the end of the test the students had to submit their test electronically within DSO but we did have a backup that they could send it by email attachment if, for some reason, the system didn’t work and some of them, because they didn’t follow the instructions, ended up they had to send it by email. Two interesting outcomes from that was one, a number of students didn’t use their Deakin email address, they used a Yahoo or some other address. Some of them I don’t think even knew that they had a Deakin email address and they just didn’t have much idea on that. The other thing we found is that a great number of them, I think, just from observation anyway, didn’t appear to have much idea how to attach a document in email at all and even with the DSO they had some difficulties there.
Int:	That’s interesting because in your unit I know that you set up practice tests and encourage students to use the practice test before actually sitting the test. Did you happen to do any comparisons between those who sat the practice tests at any time and …?
Jackling:	No we didn’t. I guess we were fairly much inundated, I mean the first time we ran it obviously we learnt a few things about the students getting the instructions right and having more staff available to support us during the test, but, no, I mean, I guess it demonstrated the typical things. Those that don’t prepare for the test in some way are really caught out when they actually come to do the test.
Int:	So that’s quite a concern about the students’ skills and, but what about the teachers because there were quite a number of teachers involved with this at different campuses, what were their experiences and also the feedback from learners overall about the online assessment?
Jackling:	We did actually develop a small research project from this to look at students’ perceptions of the usefulness of the computer assisted learning packages, the ones that were being developed at the university, and also their perceptions of the usefulness of Quickbooks. So the feedback from students was very positive about computer lab sessions generally but also about using the packages. I think they liked that interaction with the programs and the fact that we imposed on them the computer lab sessions they found that there was a real incentive to come to those lab sessions because they knew they had the test at the end so that they needed to familiarise themselves with them. So, overall I feel that the students were very positive. We did ask a question about whether we thought that it would help them get a job and we had 85% indicated that they thought it would help them with their careers. In terms of the teachers, I did get some feedback via email and the feedback there did vary. Some of the people felt that because we weren’t doing the traditional tutorial, the students were missing out on something and I think that’s probably a fairly traditional sort of view and maybe we need to evaluate that again but I feel if the students were actually using the packages effectively the learning should have taken place because they would get immediate feedback whether they were right or wrong. So there was some mixed feeling and one of things I hope to do this semester is actually have a couple traditional tutorials running at the same time as the computer labs and just to see whether students do really want those traditional classes in addition to the computer lab sessions while we’re running those.
Int:	So you would say Bev that the use of Quickbooks and use of these packages has enhanced student learning?
Jackling:	Yes, well the students’ perceptions are that they enhance their learning and we actually did a study which indicated that positive perceptions of these packages had a positive impact on their academic performance. So we do have some evidence of that.
Int:	Fantastic. How would you like to further develop online assessment in your unit?
Jackling:	Well, one of the draw backs I suppose with using the Quickbooks as the testing device on this particular unit of study was the fact that when the students sent their test result electronically to us it meant, on the Burwood campus, we had to print out 400 tests and that was not really a good way to go and that was quite cumbersome, particularly when people have to use a network printer because it gets mixed up with somebody else’s work. But at Geelong, because there were not as many students and the same at Warrnambool, the instructors were able to get the students to print out the test and that made life a lot easier but we do have to deal with very large numbers at Burwood. So what we are going to do this semester and mainly because of this printing problem, is to actually use one of the computer assisted learning packages as more the test and what I would like to see, and I have discussed this with you Pam at little bit, is because the computer assisted learning package, one of them has a self assessment test in it, so that the computer marks the test, what we would like to do is ultimately replace that as the test for Quickbooks so that it would, we’d have selective release of that in the same sort of environment where they enrol via OSCAR and that the students would have the one hour in which to do this test and they wouldn’t have to print it out. I’m hoping that we can work towards their result being automatically recorded in the grade book. So it would cut out that, one, the academics having to mark the test and two, having to report it. So it would cut back a lot of our administrative work.
Int:	Bev could you describe how your research influences your teaching practice and development?
Jackling:	I suppose it’s almost the other way around first Pam. How my teaching influences my research and then the research influences the teaching because quite often we see issues crop up in our teaching and you say, well that would be an interesting area to research because a lot of the information about teaching in universities is anecdotal. A great number of people don’t actually think of these as potential research topics so that when we saw that there were issues with students engaging with computer assisted learning it actually was a topic for research and once we’ve looked at the research outcomes in terms of this project where we’ve seen that there’s certain categories of students that don’t have very well developed computer skills when they come into the unit and that there are other issues that crop up from our questionnaire that we deliver to students, that research outcome then influences our teaching for the future and one of the things that came out from doing some research here was to actually realise that when we want students to engage rather than just being passive learners, we want them to engage using the computer lab sessions. The instructor in that lab session was very much run off their feet trying to do lots of one to one and yet we found from our research that students thought that the computer assisted learning, their perception was that it improved their learning, we therefore felt we’ve got to do more to try and provide that interaction in the classroom. So, as a result of those research outcomes we are now going to experiment with using student mentors in the classroom in those computer labs to try and enhance that interaction even further. So, that’s one example of how research influences teaching but I could give you others.
Int:	It’s bit of an iterative cycle.
Jackling:	Yes, yes, yes, yes one follows from the other, yes.
Int:	Thank you very much Bev.
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