An Interview with Alwyn Richardson
“Int” refers to the interviewer and “Alwyn” refers to Alwyn Richardson
Int:	I’m interviewing Alwyn Richardson who is one of the original developers of the core first year unit in Business Information Systems. Welcome Alwyn.
Alwyn:	Thanks very much.
Int:	Now going back to the year 2000, what was the original model for supporting learning in Business Information Systems and what were the challenges in that model?
Alwyn:	Well I don’t know about the model itself. The model was the typical study guide readings, and students were expected to work through software exercises themselves as well as work through the study guides and readings. That’s about all it was, it was just the traditional study guide and the traditional readings.
Int:	What challenges were there in that?
Alwyn:	No, we had a number of problems. The first thing was we had a change of textbook. We had been using a very good textbook that had been updated regularly and that textbook went out of print. Basically the authors were being rather naughty. They were presenting the same material for two different publishers. So, that particular textbook came to an end. The other thing that we faced was that over, I guess, the last two or three years of the 1990’s the whole of the information systems changed and the environment became much more of a ‘purchase a commodity’ rather than organisations go out and develop their systems and so we wanted to try to move and change with that. In this one we weren’t successful. Our first immediate need was to write a new unit around a new text book. We had extremely limited resources. At that stage the unit team was largely dysfunctional and an awful lot of the work on most of it fell on the unit chair.
Int:	Which was you?
Alwyn:	Well, I wasn’t at that stage, I had been and I was taken off it following a serious illness in 1999 and Rodney Carr was at that stage unit chair and we were faced with a number of problems with the unit. One of the problems with the traditional materials was that there were a lot of apparently disjointed sections to the unit and so it wasn’t obvious where they all fitted into the unit and how it formed a unified unit, so we were looking at ways to improve that. And we also felt very constrained by the traditional study guide readings approach. We thought that we should be able to do something better and it would be very nice to have some sort of audio visual presentation.
Int:	So how did you go about rethinking…?
Alwyn:	Well, Rodney and I had been talking about this on and off for about 18 months, I guess. Now there were lots of problems with that approach and one of the problems was that I also looked at that in the end of the 80’s and I’ve always been interested in training. And one of the problems with AV material is that the ratio of student time to preparation time in the 80’s was about 1 hour to 500 hours. Now we just did not have the resources to develop those sorts of materials. Now Rodney and I were talking about this and we realised we had a problem. We realised that with a new textbook we had to get up a new set of lecture slides. Rodney was very familiar with Microsoft PowerPoint and he said, look, I think we can get part the way to providing an audio visual approach using PowerPoint. And I said, okay, well let’s think about it a little bit, and at that stage it was going to be Rodney doing most of the development and I said to him, look I’m not familiar enough with the material to be able to do this but Rodney is very good at technical things and handling the personal computers. He said, well I can. And I said, well, we’ve got another whole set of problems in that all the material that we produce must be approved by the Learning Services Division and there’s no way that what we are currently thinking about would ever be acceptable. Now Rodney hadn’t been in the faculty terribly long at that stage, he’d come to us from another faculty and I knew the ropes pretty well because I had been producing extending materials in several units over a number of years. So I went straight to the Director of Teaching and Learning who was Ray Bantow at that stage and I said, look, we want to try something new, we want your permission to do so. So I guess my big contribution in that initial phase was in the background clearing out of all the hurdles that were going to stop this unit from going in the new form. And that’s basically what I worked on and as Rodney developed the stuff he gave it to me to check, etc. etc. But they were the problems we faced. We had a changing unit, we had to go to a new textbook, we had to produce the materials because the unit runs across many, many campuses and we have twinning partners in many places. It’s an extremely complex unit to run and so we had to get something together very quickly.
Int:	So, besides you and Rodney who else was on the team?
Alwyn:	Initially, we were it but, of course, we had a lot of help from the people from the various service divisions and people who helped produce the actual CD-ROMs and these sorts of issues but basically initially it was Rodney and I. Now, things changed after 2000 pretty well in that the team became more functional, many more people became involved and became very enthusiastic, and many more made very useful contributions and the thing has developed I think pretty well since then.
Int:	So when you say many more, how large was the team?
Alwyn:	About half a dozen people really contributed.
Int:	Okay.
Alwyn:	And this led to our obtaining a Vice Chancellor’s Excellence Award last year for the development of material.
Int:	Yes, of course, that’s right. So how did you work with the team and the faculty to develop this new model?
Alwyn:	My first thing was, as I say, to clear out the hurdles.
Int:	Yes.
Alwyn:	And so, I made sure that we involved people at a high level in the various learning services division and the technical divisions that were going to help us and Rodney went further with them of course and worked individually with them. And we also had to produce some sort of written study guide which in this unit was a very brief document that really was only about one or two pages per topic, basically telling students where to go on the CD-ROM to get some resources. Now, one of the advantages of that CD-ROM was, I mentioned previously that it was very difficult to see the subject as a unified whole. The CD-ROM has been organised so that when you first go into it you see the whole of the unit laid out and to go into the individual bits, you actually go down in a non-linear way through a hierarchy of windows. And in this way when ever you go into the CD-ROM, you are constantly reminded of the whole structure of the unit and where it all fits and I think that’s been a huge plus.
Int:	Okay, how did you argue the case to significant people to make the changes?
Alwyn:	I just said, look, it’s high time that we tried to update from this. Now I personally believe there is a place for printed notes, I think that they’re crucial, but I think that these audio visual materials can dramatically enrich, dramatically mightn’t be the word, but they can certainly enrich the learning environment and I argued the case along those lines, initially with Ray Bantow who was the Director of all of this at the academic level.
Int:	So in a sense you were saying this is going to assist student learning.
Alwyn:	That’s right.
Int:	… which is the bottom line.
Alwyn:	It’s bottom line, yes. And this is a very important unit for us because it’s the only unit in information systems that the majority of students coming into the Faculty of Business and Law will see and so we have to try to be very selective and very careful about what we put in it and we have to try to make it attractive and we have to try to also use it to sell some of our more advanced units.
Int:	So now how did you begin the redevelopment of this new approach?
Alwyn:	I said to Rodney, look – I had a heavy workload in other areas – I said, I can’t do to too much on this in terms of developing this. He said, I’ll develop it, you review it for me so that’s basically how it went.
Int:	Okay.
Alwyn:	Rodney did the developments and I did the reviewing.
Int:	But other members of the team made contributions?
Alwyn:	Not initially.
Int:	Not initially.
Alwyn:	Not in 2002, that happened much later. Things like the case studies had been developed in terms of - I think they had been - showing the operation of a small business that’s supported in the background by the technology.
Int:	When you first redeveloped it, how did you see it impacting on undergraduate and postgraduate student cohorts?
Alwyn:	We didn’t know. We knew it was going to be an experiment, we thought it could fall flat on its face and in a sense I don’t think it’s ever been properly evaluated, and this is a particular thing that has disturbed me.
Int:	Other than the university’s …?
Alwyn:	Other than the university’s own processes. Of course we go through the normal student evaluations and I think we score pretty much the same as any other unit. We certainly don’t get a big minus. It did cause us some initial problems at the graduate level. This unit also is enhanced as the first unit for students coming into our B.Com program, and the first year it ran, it caused a lot of difficulty largely because the person who was running it and had most of the on campus students in Melbourne didn’t understand what we were trying to do and didn’t really utilise the materials. And we had two lots of complaints about the unit and I suspect, well I’m absolutely certain, that they were because the CD-ROM wasn’t pushed by the lecturer.
Int:	On the Melbourne campus?
Alwyn:	On the Melbourne campus at the graduate level. He was a relatively inexperienced lecturer and he’d gone from a situation of face-to-face having only a small number of students to having a very large number with practically no notice.
Int:	Oh, I see.
Alwyn:	So the first year was atypical which was difficult and I believe those problems have been ironed out now.
Int:	Okay, talking about now, how have you seen this new approach developing further in recent times?
Alwyn:	Well, we had a problem initially when we sought a new textbook. The only textbook that fitted into the business environment that we could locate really was a step backward from what we had been using, but it was the only one that had a business environment of what we wanted to do. Now since then Bardo has been unit chair and Bardo has come up with a new textbook. The unit has been updated quite significantly to reflect the trends that I talked about, whereas IT is now more a consumer product than it used to be and I think that those changes have taken a lot of work but I think they have been very successful and I think that the approach works very well. Running and being unit chair of these particular first year units at Deakin is extremely difficult because of the twinning arrangements.
Int:	I see, yes. So how do you update the CD-ROM? Is that done on a yearly basis?
Alwyn:	It is pretty much done on a yearly basis and that’s one of the advantages of CD-ROMs, they can be burnt fairly easily and quickly and Learning Services have got some very, very good processes. I believe it is outsourced, I don’t really know the details, it all happens and it’s done very well and so this is the way it should be for us, we’re delighted.
Int:	Very good. Now how do you think the model needs to develop in the future or how might you think it’ll develop?
Alwyn:	Well, we’ve all got wish lists and I’d like to see it made a little bit interactive but there’s an awful lot of resources needed to do that. I think, and also, I’m no longer on the unit team, I think I’m probably on it in name but I haven’t made a contribution in the last few months certainly.
Int:	So you don’t teach in that unit either?
Alwyn:	I currently don’t teach in that unit now and I think that this is right and proper. I think that there should be a changeover. I started my computing in 1965 and yes, I’ve seen the changes and I frankly am not as up to date as I might be. And I recognise this and so I think that it’s good that younger, more recently experienced people are coming in and so I think it’s time for me to sort of pass the baton. The basic structure that I laid down I think is still very good and has been followed, but the basic structure, it’s a good structure but it needs to be updated and it needs to change with the nature of students changing. Our current students have a great deal of difficulty in going through a software product by themselves so we’re having to re-evaluate how we look at our practical work and the team is doing that and we’ve had some discussions, I’ve been involved with Bardo in informal discussions about where he sees it going but there’s a problem there too because Bardo is likely to be stepping down as unit chair.
Int:	Do you have any other comments you want to make about the unit and its development?
Alwyn:	I think that, look it’s a critical unit. When I was unit chair I felt in a very difficult position. These first year units are units that no one wants to teach.
Int:	No one?
Alwyn:	That’s right.
Int:	Why?
Alwyn:	Well, it’s much more fun to teach the “you beaut” more advanced IT stuff, IS stuff than to do the first year stuff and this is true in all of our core first year units. That seems onerous. It’s extremely difficult to teach first years because, particular with the external students, we get a lot of students who should not be here, it’s as simple as that. And Deakin are very generous in making offers to mature age students and some of them take the opportunity and run extremely well but an awful lot don’t. And we have some real difficulties with people who really and truly shouldn’t be in the unit, putting it bluntly.
Int:	Do you develop things in ways which accommodate those particular students?
Alwyn:	There’s not a lot you can do because we’ve just got…, that would need individual treatment of lots of students and we just don’t have the resources to do this. We are being stretched and the whole university sector is being stretched. I spent last week with an old friend who has recently retired from Queensland. The same business at Queensland University and Queensland University don’t have the multiplicity of twinningpartners that we have but he had precisely the same problems.
Int:	Thanks very much.
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