An Interview with Ross Monaghan
("Int" refers to the interviewer and "RES" refers to the respondent Ross Monaghan)
Int:	Ross, what are the subjects you teach in the Public Relations Program and generally what sort of learning outcomes are you looking for in regard to the units you teach?
RES:	I teach the first year students public relations writing and tactics which is a second semester unit. The first semester we give them a general overview of public relations. Second semester I come in and teach them public relations writing and tactics. A key element of that is planning. Planning to write. We teach them persuasive strategies. The other unit I teach is the public relations internship unit which is a third year unit. In their final year we send our students out to work with a public relations practitioner or within a public relations department, so we give them practical experience. Both of those units are very important for our BA PR students, because what employers tell me is that they want students who can write and can target their writing to a particular target public, which is exactly what we do in public relations writing and tactics. The other thing they tell me that they want, is experience. By sending them out and working with public relations practitioners, they get that practical experience. So there are two things that employers are looking for in our graduates.
Int:	The university is quite committed to its statement of graduate attributes called the Deakin Advantage, and it seems to me that a number of those attributes are developed at the first year level in that unit, PR writing and tactics and also particularly the internship unit. Would you like to expand on how they are developed in those two units?
RES:	If you look at the discipline specific attributes such as an understanding of the professional and industry and social contexts of a discipline, that is exactly what we are trying to do in the internship unit. Send them out. We give them two years of practical experience, teaching them how to write, given them theories. But it is the practice of public relations which really opens their eyes. I get students coming back to me and they are so excited after a couple of years of experience, coming back to me and saying "this is fantastic Ross, this is what I have been waiting to do, it was a great experience". Sure some have some issues along the way but, again looking at the attributes, knowledge, problem solving, they are the sorts of things that we are trying to instil in that unit. If you look at the personal skills, teamwork, collaboration, written communication, personal management skills, these are all things that our students really need if they are going to do their internship successfully.
Int:	Obviously the curriculum being taught is important in the two units and the internship stuff which is being learnt is about practical experience of pre PR practice. I just wonder, what particular teaching and assessment strategies do you pursue in those two different types of units which bookend the PR program?
RES:	In the first year subject public relations writing and tactics, we first give them the theory. This is how you can persuade people and I would be quick to add that public relations isn't just about persuasion, but certainly we focus on that in this particular unit. We give them some understanding of persuasive strategies, get them to think about their type of public. We give them the theory in the first couple of weeks. Then we get to work. We sit down with the students and we explain the attributes of good writing. Clear, plain English writing. How to get your message across and how to incorporate persuasive strategies in your writing. We can give them the theory of that, that's fine, but think of a pilot sitting down in an aircraft, if your pilot said to you "welcome aboard this flight, I've done three years of training but this is the first time I have ever taken up a plane". I don't know about you but I would be a bit nervous. You want somebody with those practical experiences. In the final two thirds of the first semester unit, we sit them down in the computer labs and they write, and they write, and they write. The teaching staff wander around the classroom and help the students with their writing. It was in the public relations internship unit, which is of course the final year, whilst we focus in the practical internship part of that unit of course, we also get them to think about the theories they have learnt through their three years at Deakin. We get them to apply and discuss how the theories they have learnt are actually used in the workplace, or they use them in the workplace, or that they saw happening in the workplace. The second part of the assessment in that unit, is to get them to consider their work or the work that they saw when they were doing their internship in relation to other public relations practitioners. We get them to search the academic literature, some of the professional literature to see what their peers have done as well. We get them to look at the theory. How does the work that they have done relate to the theory? How does the work that they have done relate to this practice in the industry and what the academic literature says?
Int:	Ross, I know you have come from industry and you have a practical background in regard to IT. You have a scholarly interest in regard to information and communication technologies and public relations in terms of your post graduate research. It brings us to the whole area of teaching and learning online. What is your view about the best ways of designing and operating online environments to achieve good learning, in regard to public relations education?
RES:	What teachers need to consider is the flexibility of the technology and use it in a way that best suits the applications. For example, what I do in my public relations writing and tactics unit is to use the workshops as a way to get the students to practice their writing and to get some experience in a way many publishing their work will use the computers in the labs to get the students to write, will use the technology to get them to assess their work. Look for passage sentences to see if there are any spelling, grammatical errors as well. Then we get them to post their writing exercises onto DSO within a discussion area. After a couple of weeks, whilst initially the students are a little bit nervous to put their written work in a public forum where other people can see it, I remember the first time I wrote a newspaper story I was pretty nervous about it, but after a while you get used to that and it builds your confidence. We use the technology to allow the students to do that in a safe environment within their own tutorial group. Then we get them to make constructive criticism on each others work as well. They are not only seeing their work, they are seeing other students' work as well. In the internship unit where we have students going to different organisations throughout Victoria and in fact throughout Australia and the world, we use the technology out of the traditional teaching periods to keep in contact with the students through journals and online logs or web logs and different means like that so that they can access or see what each of them is doing. They can maintain a log of their thoughts which they can relate back to when they need to do the written assessment for that unit. The key to technology is flexibility. Look at what you want to teach the students and then use the flexibility within the online environment to achieve that.
Int:	Beyond the general commitments and value of online technology, you have been an early adopter of Deakin Studies Online and shared your experience quite widely in regard to using that particular system. What have you learnt about the system and in terms of using it to best effect in regard to your teaching and facilitating student learning?
RES:	I think with a system like DSO, you really need to understand the capabilities. I talk about using the online environment in a flexible way and to be able to do that you need to know the capabilities of it as well. I would encourage anyone to, for want of a better word, play around with some of the things that you can do on DSO. The discussion groups, the online quizzes. It is a fairly safe environment. You can make changes on the fly if things aren't working throughout the semester. Or if students give you feedback, as we all know that they certainly will, you can use that feedback. You can incorporate changes throughout the semester. Again it gets back to flexibility. Knowing the way the technology works. Thinking about how you can use it to best achieve what you want from the students.
Int:	If you were crystal ball gazing and looking at your ideal technological environment to support PR education in the future, do you see things which are coming Ross, or are on the horizon which you think maybe should be adopted to enhance the whole teaching and learning experience in PR at Deakin?
RES:	I think the future is going to be wireless. I have absolutely no doubt about that. If you look at the phenomenal up take of mobile phones, you look at the number people walking around with PDAs now, there are more and more and I think the natural progression for the online learning environment will be a wireless environment. So that students won't have to sit down at home or in the lab at Deakin University. They will be able to access that information whether they are on the train going to or from work, whether they are at home sitting in the lounge, they will have access to multi media content wherever they are, whenever they want it. If you think about that from a teaching perspective as well, the interactive elements of that are fantastic. If I am sitting in my lounge room at home at 6.00 o'clock one evening and I see something coming on the news that night that I think is relevant for what I am teaching, boom, wireless technology, that can go out immediately and you get instant feedback from the students. I think it is a wireless future and just as DSO has really radically changed the way we teach students, once we become wireless, that will be an even more radical and beneficial way to teach.
Int:	Just as a final question. You have touched on the new environment for learning about PR in terms of new technology, possibly which we could adopt. What about the impact of information and communication technologies on the theory and practice of public relations in terms of the subject matter itself?
RES:	People now have such a wide variety of means of gathering information. One thing that I am very conscious of when I am explaining new communications technology to my students is that, whilst I might be teaching my first year students about wireless technology or communicating via the internet, when they are practitioners in three years time, if I think back three years, things have changed so much. So I think our students really need to keep abreast of the changes. I f you think back to the attributes of Deakin graduates, what we want is life long learning. When it comes to information technology I don't think that there is any difference. You need to keep abreast of the way people gather information, what people are reading, what people are watching or listening to. Getting back to my first year subject, PR writing and tactics, where you want to influence a particular target public, to be able to do that you need to be able to communicate effectively with them and if you can't do that, if you don't know where they are getting their information, if you don't know how to reach those people… so keep abreast of the technology and really embrace it and use it to the best of your advantage.
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