An Interview with Kevin O'Toole
(“Int” refers to the interviewer and “BD” refers to the respondent Kevin)
Int:	Kevin I am interested in the subjects you teach in the Politics and Policy studies major and particularly what there learning outcomes might be.
BD:	Yes, I teach in the Introductory Politics Unit AIP107 which is Political Action and Freedom and Justice and I also teach a course called Working with Government in which we basically put together three types of elements, 1) An understanding of the political process; 2) Some research methods if you like; 3) Some more practical things about just how to go about writing and writing reports, so pull all those three together and kind of a tension but a good mix where students can actually learn some theoretical understanding of the political process by actually applying their writing skills in a particular area. So it is an ambitious task which I think, I am not sure that it fully works at the moment but I have been experimenting and changing and building it up over the three or four years to a stage where now student responses and evaluations really feedback well with Working with Government. In the Introductory Unit in Politics I also teach an internship as well but I will steer away from that at the moment because the internship again is very much an experiential learning process which has a different set of pedagogical issues if you like associated with it an introductory unit of politics, we have been for the last few years experimenting again with trying to get students more involved, the big thing is trying to get students involved and actually applying what they are doing in class to their every day experience. We started out with a work book experience of trying to get them to do work every week looking at newspapers applying… We ran into a problem of how to actually assess that because the students like when they do things like to also have assessment, so there is again a bit of a tension if you like at times between trying to get students to actually do things which we think they are going to learn but also assessing that learning process. So sometimes it is trying to build a… We have found that to a degree reasonably difficult to start assessing their analyses of different newspaper articles because when you have got, like on the Geelong campus you have got 150 students, prefer to have something like 180 at Melbourne and we had 120 off campus and now we have got 40 at Warrnambool. A lot of students all doing different newspaper articles, we just found it really difficult to try to work out an assessment regime where we could apply the criteria in a fair and equitable way, so we moved from the work book experience we worked more towards questions around the texts and around the study guide and then used that as the basis for tutorial work and for off campus students, we used that on DSO, that was the basis of their weekly discussion, the question and then they could come in and discuss. Now there is off campus students it is also mandatory that they do come in and discuss and we have found that in the first instance that not a lot of students were actually coming on to the DSO site to discuss. But those who were, there was quite a lively discussion around the questions so the notion of having a work book of what we did was we collected that work book in about week eight or nine because they had to answer the questions they were much more able to make the assessment simply because we knew what we were looking for in particular that questions were related to their readings and they were related to the study guide and so we had a much greater chance of applying the criterion based marking to the project. But again we have found that while we wanted a basis of discussion in tutorials, it works at times but we find we are probably going to have to break it down into small baskets rather than in the students big questions, in the smaller questions and what we are doing next year in fact is we are breaking it down in the smaller baskets but we are also going to try an online quiz, so that the whole idea of answering the questions in class and getting the people to answer questions is that we will then have an online quiz in about week eight or nine in which the students will go… And the assessment will be again probably not as good as, if you like, filling in a work book because they are not writing they are actually just doing a quiz but again the focus will be that what we are teaching and learning will actually being assessed. so that there is a strong relationship between the two. That is an experiment we are trying this year coming up, we are presently building the questions and have been talking to, getting technical, getting online, etc it does not appear all that difficult getting it on, we think. We are working with the Respondus program and so we put all those questions together so hopefully we will have all those together in March. So it is that tension if you like or the way between teaching and the learning process and the assessment processes trying to sort of lead them towards one or the other. And also of course, the faculty and it is a much cheaper way to assess simply because you do not have to have people marking because the computer can do the marking because it is a cheaper way to go.
Int:	It seems to me Kevin, you know you are talking about the value of learning in the field and in the classroom and online, stepping back and reflecting on the different aspects of your designed teaching and learning environment, what do you see as the unique value created in those different types of environment, classroom, on campus, in the field, off campus and online?
BD:	Well I try to think of them as working as one, while they are different obviously if you are off campus, you are not in a classroom, vice versa and trying to get the learning experience of each student to be grounding theory in their every day practise. Now everybody can do that whether they are in the class room or out of the class room. The advantage of on campus students is that they are able to bring that experiences into the class room and discuss face to face. I think that is always more valuable than online simply because online you are writing and the experience is not as immediate interactive, you have got an idea and you put it out there and it comes straight back in the class room, whereas in some ways it may be the other side of it of course is that students going online have to be a bit more reflective about what they write, so because as they think, and so it may be that by going online they are actually instilling into their minds at a greater rate. I suppose if I could move to Working with Government last year, I did not have any off campus students in Working with Government I had the unit online and worked in a mixed mode with the on campus students again as an experiment before I went off campus to see how it would work. So I got students to actually work through the online as well as work in the class room. We did it on a workshop basis in the class room, it is not a lecture process it is purely a workshop ?… of course and what I found was that once the students came to class and had their discussions etc, then trying to get them to reflect outside online, they did not want to do it, they felt that in a sense they may be double dipping that we asked them to make a discussion and then make a further discussion online, we found that the online discussion possibly was not used very much at all. Some students used it quite a lot but others just stayed right away because they had their class and they thought that was useful. So I am not sure next year when I come to teach online that the off campus students, I am not making it mandatory for them to come on and discuss because I think we have already found this in other places. When you actually look at the number of first year students who have come online to have a look but are not necessarily been part of the program, it is fairly high. In fact most of the first year students actually accessed the DSO, they actually were looking at things over the semester. Some of them were looking at the discussion but were not taking part in the discussion. So my view is that I do not particularly want to force people online if they do not want to. I do force them online in the Working with Governments simply because in the process, what they have got to do is choose from the beginning a report and if that report is not going to be the basis of their assessment through the semester. So I get them to actually right from the start to write a 500 word summary which is not assessed but which is a hurdle to climb because they have to put it online which means that you then get all these students having to access there, so actually having to write some of their assignments up so it is a way of getting them in and online, so that is a hurdle to climb, if they must put that up there somewhere at the start. So in terms of getting back to your question about the relationship between them, they are obviously different modes of teaching but what I am constantly trying to do is think of ways of getting the students to reflect upon what they are doing in a way which they have to feed back to you in some shape or form. As I said, class room reflection may be quick and gone, the nice thing about online reflection is when they put it on there, it is there in writing and the can see it again. So to some extent it may be a better reflective process, I am not sure fully, I have not been able to test, next year I will be able to test to see the relationship between what the online responses are to certain kinds of activities as opposed to the off campus students because what I am doing again Working with Government is a series of short assignments that they do. They do three short assignment then a final assignment. The whole program leads to their final assignment, the program is aimed at that final thing and every week they are doing building, a case if you like to actually answer the final assignment. They end up doing a critical report, a critical review of the report that they choose from the start. All the way through they are building on it. I have now got three short processes going through, I have got an annotated bibliography again just to give them a context of the report. I get them to do a short survey question to understand the nature of language and writing. Not so much the survey questions per se but just to get them to understand the nature of language and how language can change, it is just a good exercise for them to understand how if you ask a certain question, you will get certain responses and if they look at that in terms of the kind of language they used in their report, it may highlight for them the fact that a report is written following a certain question or a certain direction and they begin to understand the kinds of values that underlay it. Then they have to do a cabinet submission whereby they then have to take their report, reduce it down to 500 words and they answer it as a cabinet submission proforma which I have got online which they fill in. But again it is about putting it in context because they have to go and get online on to the web, look up the various ministries, look at what will be associated with their report, who are the ministers etc, etc, so again it is leading them into government because the course is called Working with Government and the whole course is meant to be leading them there. Finally after doing these various processes, their assessment is about the review of where they have gone. My whole aim in this again is by the end of it I am hopeful, and you can see it, you can see that they have really got in mined the report and understood the values that drive the report or where it comes from. The weaker students do not get on to that deeper message but they get on to, if you like, the more surface critique. But the really good students will get on to deeper critique of values and that is where we are going so, I mean all students could get to that depth of critique if they really put their minds and hearts into it but a lot of students are not there to put their minds and hearts into it, they are there to pass, and they do the minimum.
Int:	Kevin I guess as Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning for the faculty in being involved in overseeing the implementation of Deakin Studies Online for a number of years, reflecting on your unit and designing and moderating online discussion areas, and also in your role as Associate Dean, what are the key things you think you have learnt about setting up and running well online environments to promote good quality learning from an Arts' perspective overall?
BD:	Well I think the first thing that I have learnt from it is that what you have got to do is you have to forget about being online and you have got to think about what you want to achieve. You have got to think about what it is you want in terms of your teaching, the kinds of processes that you want the students to learn, or the kinds of theories that you want them to understand, or the kinds of skills that you want them to get. You think about those first, you must think about those and then, once you have thought about those you then think about the various strategies and tactics that you can use to move students in that direction. And there, so becomes if you like, just another strategy, it is just another process that you can use, so the DSO is not up in front, the DSO is, as another tool that you can use to enhance that and I think, as I was saying before, getting students to actually write online I think this may be a better way of reflective thinking rather than actually just being in the classroom because in the classroom people say it comes off the top of their head then it is probably gone. Whereas when they had to sit and write something, they write it, they have written, they have got it again, they can maintain it. And in saying teaching…Working with Government for example, what I keep saying to the students is I want you to keep your reflections for the whole semester if you go so that when you get to write your final report, you have got all those bits and pieces that you can then draw back on. And if you have actually written stuff as you go, then it is a much better way to go. Now that is also the way you would write a report which they are critiquing, it is a process of learning about research, it is a process about learning writing, it is a process of learning about planning, which is all about how I want to go about organising my teaching to begin with, and that is to say OK, where do I want to get to, how am I going to get there, what are the steps and write down those steps as you go, therefore using the online, using DSO can be a helpful device for students. It is also a good way of allowing students to get online for other ways, and that is, I mean I have got a whole series of URLs that are on the site. That means that students get on and they can click immediately and that makes it easy for them to get into rather than having to get the URL, write them in and type them in and perhaps miss the process but it means they can get in to processes a lot more easily, get online especially government these days because government is becoming more E-government to be online is important, you can go to the Victorian web site now, right up front is all the E-services that they now offer. E-government is becoming a much bigger and it means that people need to know how to handle online and how to use the online and also know how to not only get online and use the services but to be able to understand what department etc that they are looking for, they need to understand how you work with government in those processes.
Int:	Would you say that you could generalise those observations to many disciplines and professional fields taught within the Faculty of Arts overall? …think the curriculum having to have a focus on E- something, like E-government?
BD:	I think yes, why not? I think that, well for example I know at the moment the staff in dance for example, they are looking at the relationship of moving online, in terms of focus of the various types of digital imaging and everything that they can use in dance, they obviously use it in the visual arts area, in areas of philosophy you have to use it, I mean there is, you know you can no longer talk about the world without being online in some shape or form. Now that does not mean to say that you necessarily need to be DSO but I am just saying that you need to be able to focus and use it as an enhancement to your learning. People get a bit confused about online as an end in itself, whereas my view is that online is a useful device that if you really look at and really want and get into you can enhance your teaching immensely. I think it is a terrific addition. The major problem I suppose is the new learning process of students and people simply because, well I think DSO is probably a little complex, overly complex for students at times but and it is not very intuitive in lots of ways but at the same time you can get beyond that, if you can actually work through that process then I think you will probably be a better E-user in the long run simply because the more complex a program you can use in the first instance then when you come across simpler programs you will burn it. I can remember when I first used SPSS for example, on this campus I used to sit down and I used to actually write the script, write the whole script out, then I had to walk out of the computer centre down there and run off the thing and then if I had made a mistake I would walk all the way back and I can remember that I learnt doing it that way I can … SPSS, I can understand who it comes from, how it works and all that process. Learning computer that way I think has made me, you know, I will just attack any computer program now simply because you know that you cannot do any damage basically and the same with DSO I think you take a risk, if it does not work something else happens. You will not destroy whole lots of things unless you are very, very unlucky. I think you have got to have up front as I keep saying, what do you want to do and I think more staff could probably see the use of DSO if they knew what they wanted to do in their teaching in the first place. And I think what DSO does for you is it also helps you think about the kinds of ways you assess, it helps you to think about the relationship between your assessments and the experience of the students. It helps you think about not of the assessment the experience of the students, but what is the aim in your actual teaching, which I think in some ways is missing. A lot of people do not really think about what they are doing when they are teaching. I think they put together a series of theories or something they want the students to learn without thinking about how they are actually going to teach those theories. It is the learning process that I think is important that is why I mean, Associate Dean, Teaching and Learning, it is the learning aspect that I try to really focus on, simply because if you do not look at the learning end of it then no matter how good a performer or teacher you are students just do not how to learn. Now I am looking at the evaluations of course at the time, my evaluations are pretty good, there are four but you would like them to be up higher, but I think at the same time certain subjects are not going…I think evaluations can keep you on track but you are not going to please every student, that is another thing we should think about, you cannot make every student happy. I think a lot of students are not there to learn, they are there to pass and they want to get to it the easiest way possible.
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