An Interview with Hans Lofgren
“Int” refers to the interviewer and “Hans” refers to Hans Lofgren
Int:	Hans, I was interested in the subjects you teach in the Politics and Policy Studies major—just to get a feel for the general purposes of those units in regard to students taking a politics major overall.
Hans:	Well, its one of the range of majors obviously available in the Arts faculty and it's not a highly vocational major—it is a traditional academic one in very many respects preparing students for a range of careers in the public sector in journalism and for further studies of various kinds, postgraduate studies of various kinds. There is an element of vocational training in that there are some units that provide training in policy analysis and knowledge of the workings of government that would be useful for people being employed by local government, state government, federal government, but many of the units have a fairly academic orientation and one of the strengths of politics at Deakin is political theory. Course, the professor of politics, Geoff Stokes, is a political theorist.
Int:	So, my understanding was that one of the key factors to be taken into account, or there are probably two or three, but one in terms of revamping the whole major was to try and strengthen certain generic attributes. The other ones related, I think, to further internationalisation and going online more and better. But in terms of generic attributes, one thing that you did do in your Principles of Policy Studies unit was introduce the idea of a group assignment which was quite a major assignment. Would you like to comment generally on what you tried to do in developing further some of these key generic attributes and maybe that one to do with group work and collaboration.
Hans:	Well, in actual work in organisations, the type of organisations that social workers are employed in, for example, and this particular unit is a compulsory component of the social work course, is to be able to work with others in team settings of various kinds. So what I did introduce the year before last was an assignment that was to be a team project to prepare a cabinet submission and quite detailed guidelines were provided in DSO and a DSO space for each team was made available that I could access and the team members could access but that other students could not access, so there were in the order of 20 odd such distinct team spaces made available to provide for communication between members of those teams. Also, it was possible to post documents or to circulate drafts of various bits and pieces of this assignment within the DSO environment and thereby facilitating exchange and so on. That was a fairly challenging exercise in setting up and in managing and in making students also take advantage of these technical facilities and unfortunately, or admittedly, there were some problems in making this work well as would be the case with team assignments generally so all of these issues of fair contributions on behalf of all team members and so on, all of those issues came up and were challenging, so from my point of view it was a trial, an exercise, and an interesting one but in the end I decided this year to go back to more traditional assessments and there are several reasons for that—the problems that I referred to, the fact that I was on study leave last semester, I haven't been able to invest that time that would have been required to really take advantage of those experiences and redevelop the assessment and there is some scepticism, I think, within the faculty in respect of team assignments. So, I think we may have to revisit that type of setup at a later stage. This year, I'm back to having only one assignment within the DSO environment and a couple of exercises, also within DSO, but the main assignments being submitted hard-copy in the traditional way.
Int:	We'll come back to the Deakin Studies Online in a moment, how do you see effective teaching and learning overall in the whole field of politics—I mean you mentioned political theory—what are you looking for, for a student to master, to call them a good student of politics and how do you try and teach to that?
Hans:	The core modes of learning in a disciplinary area such as this one, remains reading and writing and thinking about reading and writing and DSO and electronic environment, internet, and so forth cannot be allowed to distract from that core. If you study political theory or if you study history, if you study any other type of social science, you can't get around to that basic engagement with reading and it is a potential hazard I think with DSO or that type of electronic environment that students are led to believe that there are shortcuts and that visual interaction and online technologies can somehow substantially facilitate that basic learning requirement which is, you know, sitting with a book with the text, taking notes, thinking, and of course it is still the case that you don't really like reading from the screen, none of us really like to read for any length of time from a screen.
Int:	So, we can home in on Deakin Studies Online, but in the broader context of your view of an effective teaching and learning environment for your units in politics, let's go through some of the key dimensions of it. What do you try and do in lectures in making a unique contribution to facilitating student learning? What's the role and purpose there of the lecture?
Hans:	Well, lecturers again must presume that students have either already engaged in some reading or are about to do so on the theme of the lecture, so I suppose the purpose of the lecture is to provide some guidance and provides some context for those readings and ideally, also, to project the excitement of studying these sorts of things and we would all wish for charismatic and, you know, enormous entertaining lectures that can provide, can generate some enthusiasm which may be to ask a bit much generally speaking, because most of us are not necessarily like that but I suppose we are trying to make the theoretical studies come alive, at least to some extent.
Int:	In terms of moving from the lecture to the tutorial and being the tutor, how would you define the role of tutor and tutorial in relation to the lecture? What are you trying to do in a tutorial?
Hans:	Well, tutorials are intended as an environment where students are, of course, more active and where there is interchange between students and between the tutor and the students, so what I have had is, I'm posting a set of tutorial questions week by week in DSO and those questions serve as a framework for the tutorial discussion and I've also generally organised at the commencement of the semester for students to sign up for an oral presentation once during the semester. Previously, that presentation had to be submitted in hard-copy as well. This year, I'm only asking students to make that oral presentation but they are certainly advised that this is something that they should take seriously and I've referred them to the Student Life website where there is very good advice on class presentations. But, of course, at times it is a challenge to generate that kind of participation in tutorials and some of the tutorials are also quite large, in the order of 20 students or even more at times which means that at times they may take on the character of a mini lecture but, of course, then one has not been particularly successful.
Int:	So, coming to Deakin Studies Online, and you're really one of the initial group of adopters of the learning management system from version one, and adopted it with an open mind and engaged very strongly and reflected and documented your initial impressions and experiences. Over that period, Hans, what could you conclude about working with that type of technology? What are some of the key lessons that you think you've learnt and you'd like to pass onto others?
Hans:	Through other staff?
Int:	Other staff.
Hans:	Well, as many would say, it is time-consuming to get to the point where you can comfortably design your unit website and upload documents and make it all come together in a reasonable way, it does require a lot of effort though my impression is that each version of DSO has become somewhat easier to work with and having been away recently for 9 months without having any contact with DSO, I was quite apprehensive that I would have lost many of the relative skills that I had developed but I'm pleased to find in coming back that I haven't forgotten much and it seems to me much easier than in previous years to make documents available and so on. So, that's one point that it is time-consuming and challenging and one has to be fairly motivated and committed to put in that effort—not being too frustrated and upset by problems that are bound to arise. On the positive side, of course, it does provide for a lot of flexibility that one would not otherwise have, for example, in making weekly readings, tutorial questions available, not necessarily with only a few days advance, but you can plan ahead and you don't need to make the study material and the tutorial material for the whole semester available at the commencement of semester, you can load material three weeks in advance and you can provide access to electronic readings relatively easily as discussions, tutorials, lectures demonstrate that there's a need for particular types of advice, particular types of documents, material and, of course, you are able to interact more flexibly with the students via the various communication facilities in DSO.
Int:	Do you detect any difference between the use and value attributed to communication in DSO between your on-campus student group and your off-campus student group?
Hans:	There would be some on-campus students who resent having to do too much in DSO, certainly that was the experience in the first couple of years that the question was well 'why do we have to do this, when we do meet you a couple of times a week, face to face?' whereas there would be some feedback from off-campus students to the effect that this is really a great way of keeping in touch and being able to communicate. On the other hand, there are some off-campus students who do not have good DSO broadband access and I suppose over time that problem will diminish but there were certainly some students in outback areas, Koori students and others, who were not really able to take advantage of DSO, so what I had to do was to make sure that the critical information was circulated in hard-copy as well as in DSO. This year I am hopeful that that will not be necessary but I have to wait and see. I did collect data on the extent of DSO access week by week in my first couple of units available in DSO and my recollection of the figures is that there was a substantial minority of students who did not regularly access DSO and if that is the case, of course, one has a problem in relying too extensively on that electronic interaction.
Int:	If you had a sense, Hans, of your ideal digital media technology environment to support your teaching, are there things that you would like to see in DSO or other technologies you'd like to see available that could help improve your teaching and student learning or, at the moment, do you think the environment is appropriate enough?
Hans:	There are next steps that I'm sure are being explored and prepared by you and within Deakin such as, in particular, electronic assignment submissions because DSO does generate expectations on the part of, certainly a minority of students, that all sorts of things should be done that we are perhaps working towards but not yet able to provide and I think highest on that list would be online submission of assignments.
Int:	And finally, Hans, it's almost a question that takes me back to the first question I put to you but one of the forgotten areas of academic teaching and we've gone through running lectures and tutorials and DSO and so on, is really curriculum innovation and like a colleague of yours we interviewed in a separate case, you actually had to revamp an entire unit, the Principles of Policy Studies unit, you had to create I think a brand new unit subject around business and government and I believe you're on the verge of potentially developing a new curriculum around politics and technology as a wholly online unit. In terms of your passions for teaching, what sort of value do you attribute to being given that opportunity of coming up with new subjects which really reflect your teaching and scholarly interests?
Hans:	Well, it's ideal being able to combine one's teaching and one's research interests and it was fortunate for me that when I came to Deakin I had to redevelop this particular unit and, at about the same time, DSO was coming in so as you say, that did overlap in time and it is a unit where we introduce a number of particular cases of public policy such as the child support scheme as one such example of public policy and it is then possible in an online environment to provide up to date and interesting inroads into the Child Support Agency various interest groups in that area and to be flexible and up to date in providing a sense to the students of what public policy entails, participants' issues, recent developments and so on, and in working on the new fully online unit, politics of technology, that will be even more the case because we will seek to provide for reflection on technology and also the technology that students are using in their studies for this particular unit, so there were sorts of interesting perspectives that can be opened up I think in that context.
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