An Interview with Stuart Palmer
(“Int” refers to the interviewer, “Stuart" refers to Stuart Palmer
Int:	I'm happy to have with me today Doctor Stuart Palmer from the Faculty of Science and Technology. Stuart, thanks for joining us.
Stuart:	No worries James.
Int:	Today we'd like to talk about your unit 'Fundamentals of Technology Management' and, if possible, could you give us some background on the unit and your experience of it?
Stuart:	Sure. 'Fundamentals of Technology Management' is a first year, first semester unit, so it's one of the ones that most students strike at the beginning of their course. Includes topics such as written and oral communication, the nature of professional practice, history of technology, some management theory, and an introduction to quality management. So, it's all the things that commencing Engineering students have no interest in [laughs] and are wondering what the hell they're doing studying it! So it presents a little bit of a… a challenge to introduce them to some new ideas perhaps. The enrolment is relatively large, because it is a first year unit, so it's common to all the courses. Some mature-age students may have an exemption, but by-and-large, we see all the students. I've been Unit Chair for this unit every year since I started at Deakin, so… that goes all the way back to 1995, and, it was back in 1995 that I started introducing some online support for the unit. So, in those days that was hand coding HTML webpages, and mounting them in my Deakin ITS account space so that they could be served out by the university web server. Things like: copies of lecture notes, links to material related to the course, model assignment submissions, solutions to previous year's exam papers, that type of stuff; very strategic stuff that students like to see. And an interactive discussion area that was based on a VT100 terminal dial-up system… the good old tier system that was operating back at Deakin then. But, even then, students valued an opportunity for a two-way discussion with themselves and with me. Since that time, the unit and the online support which has sort-of grown more sophisticated as it migrated its way through every online system that Deakin has used, up until the present day of course, where it resides within DSO.
Int:	Could you tell us about your decision, and practice of introducing video streaming into this unit? What prompted it originally?
Stuart:	The unit has always used video resources, because the library has got a number of really good, commercially produced videos, that we've been using; particularly in tutorial classes as a prompter or a backgrounder for discussion. And, one of the topics that we cover in the unit is professional ethics, and, you know, how that applies to professional practice and one of the model case studies that's used around the world is the ethical issues associated with the Challenger disaster. And, there's many aspects, and it sort of bundles into a really good, solid sort of set of issues that you can talk about. And, most engineering students kind of like big machines, and things that blow up… and so it's a really good case study, and it's the one that's used around the world. The library has a really good commercial video on the topic that I've used in class, nearly every year, but, there's only one copy, and so it's really hard for off-campus students to get access to that material, and that's always been sort of a bit of an issue in my mind. There's some websites you can go to, but it's not the same experience. And as much as possible, I try to make the experience for all student cohorts the same. Fortunately, or unfortunately—depending on how you look at it, following the Columbia shuttle disaster in late 2003, Four Corners screened a BBC documentary which really traced the whole history of the shuttle program, with a particular emphasis on critical issues that lead to: first, the Challenger disaster; and then almost identical issues through to the Columbia disaster, and what was fixed, and what wasn't, and what didn't change and all of those issues. And it was an excellent case study. I arranged for an off-air recording to be taken by the AV Department, which they did for me, and through the 'TV and radio licence of screenwriters Australia' that Deakin has, that material, if recorded off-air, is then available for use for educational purposes, including duplication and distribution to off-campus students. So, here I had my video case study that I could use for all students. So, that was really… that was fantastic. After the recording was done, the library, in due course, forwarded me a VHS tape of the documentary, which I took home, plugged into my old VHS player, recorded it onto my little digital handicam, which… I then was able to get that digital form into my computer, into my Windows Movie Maker program, and was then able to produce a digital version of it that I could distribute on DSO and on CD-ROM that was very compact, allowed me to have the whole 45 minutes of the video in about 100 megabytes, perfect! Ran off copies, put it on CD, sent it to all the off-campus students, mounted it in DSO so that the on-campus students could access it through the lab. And now I had this, sort of, common resource which was really, really good for this particular topic, open to all students.
Int:	Since that discovery and that experience, you've moved on somewhat in providing video streaming. Could you tell us a bit about that?
Stuart:	Sure. So that was really my first trial, was this sort of, I guess big hit 45 minute thing in one go, and, while that certainly serves the particular purpose it was set out to do, the whole process of getting it up online, and getting it out to students, having them using it, considering I hadn't done it before went remarkably painlessly. I was very surprised by the almost complete absence of any queries from off-campus students; and so that prompted me to look for other sources that I could use, and I've since discovered that there's—particularly for the area that I teach, which is the management of technology—there's a plethora of fabulous video material almost every night and every week on news, current affairs and business-type programs. So, I'm now to the point where I'm set up at home with a computer with a TV tuner card, and I'm recording these things myself off air directly into digital form, and compiling a library of material that I've got to choose from, to add. Really, one of the main purposes, as I see it, is to provide little video exemplars that sort of provide a concrete tangible example of material they might be talking about in class. So, I got a good example the other weekend… in class we talk about, in the final year unit we look at the idea of business strategies, and we look at sort of Porter's model of three generic business strategies. Within five minutes of each other on Business Sunday, it wasn't even the actual program, it was the advertisements, there was an ad for Qantas, and an ad for Jetstar. And, they take, sort of, two opposing strategies for marketing their business; one is a very cost-sensitive one; and the other one is about sort of being a premium product, and you can see this perfectly in the two ads. And so now I've got these two little examples—about thirty seconds each, that I can now use to demonstrate tangibly that idea.
Int:	Brilliant. And, how are you… how are you capturing it now? Presumably you've moved on from the VHS…?
Stuart:	Ah, yes. As I said, my computer's now hooked up to my antennae, and um, it's coming direct into digital form, which I can then run down into a small version, compact version, which I can then distribute in DSO. I used that again in second semester this year, another large, about 40 minute segment, and this time, I didn't run off any CDs, I didn't send it to any off-campus students, I just made it available in DSO to everybody, with a little note saying, you know, if any students were having difficulty accessing it, please contact me—and in a class of 200, I had nobody contact me. Now, it is true historically that Engineering students in previous surveys we've done have had reported high levels of access to the internet, and high levels of use of the internet. Without doing a survey, the sort of, I guess the… anecdotal evidence from this semester has been that they now, by and large, have access to broadband internet as well—either at home, at university or at work. And, for me that's really exciting 'cause it confirms that I can go ahead and use these video resources to enhance the learning materials wherever I can.
Int:	That's great. And um, it's currently the 'Stuart Palmer project', how would you like to see this develop?
Stuart:	Like a few things I've done in the past, certainly within our school, eventually the fact that sort of these things are going on in fact leaks out; and other people ask about it, and certainly this year I've had a few people ask me about what I'm doing, and that they'd be really keen to do something similar, so what's the mechanics for doing it? So, I've been out there explaining to people how they go about requesting off-air recordings, and how they can… various means by which they might then get it reduced to digital form, so they can integrate it into their teaching. I don't think anyone's kind of taken up the challenge yet, but certainly there's strong interest. I did conduct an evaluation in Semester 1 this year, of what students got out of these online video resources. In this instance, they were provided in a sort of non-compulsory manner; that is there was no assessment attached to them, they were provided as a… one of the many resources for the unit. And so I asked students to report their usage of it, and it was about fifty per cent of the class reported using it. But interestingly, it was ninety-plus per cent for off-campus students. And, when I asked students what the… value they got out of it, there was a difference between the two groups again. On-campus reported primarily as just an additional resource that they could call upon, and you know, I guess that when they're on-campus; they've got me, they've got the course material, they've got the library, they've got their friends, and they also had this video material. Off-campus students reported slightly differently, they said that it actually helped them understand the issues we were talking about. So, these are the students that have got the printed course material, but, in the past didn't have access to the video case study about the shuttle disaster: now they did. And they were reporting that it helped them sort of contextualise the things we were sort of talking about more abstractly in the course material. So that was interesting, it seems like there's been a… of particular value to the off-campus students, now that they've got this material that the on-campus students have had access to themselves for many years.
Int:	That's great. Well thank you very much for your time today Stuart.
Stuart:	No worries James.
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