Well this process started a couple of years ago with a Teaching Explorer that I did to see if there were institutions overseas that we could collaborate with. The Deakin University forensic science program was well established now within Australia got a good reputation here was time to think internationally and it was clear that there were a number of institutions overseas who were interested in collaborating with us but at the time we were thinking about ways of maybe doing this a little bit more differently being able to use things like virtual exchange particularly considering other institutions use WebCT. Unfortunately it appeared that other institutions particularly in the UK which is where we were concentrating on because that was a natural place to…weren't terribly interested in this sort of approach primarily because most of them still looked at online as being a repository of learning or teaching materials rather than using it in a more I suppose active sense also there was the financial issues it was a case of yes you can we'll exchange stuff with you but you have to buy ours that sort of thing. So that caused us a few problems however when we looked into it in more detail it has to be said that there was interest in exchanges as well but in real exchanges maybe not to surprisingly Australia is considered to be a really, really, really interesting destination for northern hemisphere students and so they weren't so much interested in virtual exchanges as in real exchange and those investigations are still ongoing. However one area that would appear that we do have potential for is not actually whole units but parts of our units actually unpacking some of the materials we have in our units and combining them together in different ways to provide different learning modules as it were for different people and a very good example of this is our pilot program which is in collaboration with the University of Hull. In the United Kingdom in the last few years there has been an explosion in forensic science courses some of them are of questionable quality it has to be said. Recognising this the forensic science society has tried to establish an accreditation process and some of the degrees they have degrees that are purely forensic science but also they have science degrees, chemistry degrees which have elements of forensic embedded within them and they're accrediting these two types of courses. Now the University of Hull has a well known well respected analytical chemistry degree it seemed obvious to them that they should incorporate maybe forensic modules as part of that and when they went for their accreditation or looked at the first draft of the accreditation the Forensic Science Society said well look it's terrific the science is first class everything is there that we want however you don't have significant legal components, you don't have a significant sort of case study component that we would like to see in any course that has forensic on its title. Now we've had close collaboration with Hull over a number of years in the research area and so they were reasonably familiar with the sorts of things we were teaching and we were involved in and they were interested in accessing some of the things that we do in our forensic course because we were a little bit unusual in that unlike many forensic courses instead of teaching all the law and the legal part of it as a single chunk generally towards the end of the course we actually teach our legal component all the way through the course so that the science is taught or the forensic science is taught in the context of the law and the law is taught in the context of the forensic science and they were very intrigued by that and interested in that and it happens that we have certain parts of that which can be taken from first year and from second year and from third year that can actually be drawn out and put together to form a separate learning entity on its own.

Now our legal studies are actually provided by a visiting Fellow the legal support is given supported by a visiting Fellow who actually resides in the UK travels to Australia once a year to teach the expert evidence part of our course and has helped in developing things like moot court and so on and while he was able to help the people at Hull directly with running their moot court he didn't have the time to be also able to give the lectures there as well so what we've done is we've videoed his lectures incorporating that with his PowerPoint slides and other notes in rich media teaching materials that will go on a CD rom using a package called StreamAuthor and this will be provided to the people at Hull, their students will use this so that essentially a virtually an exchange of the member of staff and he will then go to Hull just for the final part of it to help with the running of the mock trial which is one part of the assessment we will also because we already have worked through the mock trial for a number of years now we'll be providing them with those materials. Now materials we're providing of the expert evidence and the mock trial these come from different parts of our forensic degree but because of the way that we have structured the forensic degree we can actually unpack it as I said and put it together to form a new entity. We see there being real potential to continue to look at our courses and see in other ways in which we can unpack them in this way what I would like to see or foresee is the potential that some of our lectures on introduction to forensic science could be parcelled together with maybe lectures from ecology and environment on wildlife conservation then you have a essentially have a little module then essentially on wildlife forensics a very very interesting area at the moment. I'm sure there are other courses where you could think in the same way you could unpackage things and insert bits into other areas to think about possibly offering postgraduate diplomas and so on where these materials can be used from higher levels in our courses. It also has to be said that the potential is there as well for dealing with absences of staff and so on in the same way and we all realise that there are limited number of specialist staff particularly in niche areas in the university. These are niche areas that we can't afford just to stop if a member of staff is ill or has to be away at meetings or whatever rather than just cancel lectures we have maybe the potential to make use of this material in a different way.