An Interview with Paul Turner
“Int” refers to the interviewer and “Turner” refers to Paul Turner
Int:	Paul, I'm interested to talk to you about your e-simulation development and if I could get the title correct to begin with, Model for Interactive Decision-making Application in Sport Management and it's called MIDAS.
Turner:	That's correct
Inter:	To get the overall context for the development of MIDAS, I just wanted to talk to you first about the subjects you teach in sports management and what their purposes are.
Turner:	Well, Sport Management is one of the majors in the Bachelor of Commerce. Now there's 6 sport-related units that we teach, basically from a policy development unit through to an event management, facility and event management units. And in between, there are a couple of electives, a practicum as well as a sport marketing unit. What we try and do is break them into core management units and then more sport marketing related focus, so our introductory units are essentially governance, the sports system, the Australian sport system, sport in society, how it affects and impacts society, managing sport in terms of how you can manage, coaches, athletes, sports scientists and so on, and then we get into the specific areas of sport facility management, sport project management which is an event management unit and sport and the law. So they're our core units that we teach.
Inter:	And your particular units are in the area of event facility management?
Turner:	Yes I teach in the facility and event management area and also in the sport marketing area in the postgraduate or masters program.
Inter:	And does MIDAS relate to those two areas or just to the event and facility management subject at the moment?
Turner:	As it currently stands it is only in the facility management specifically unit. It's got some degree of cross-over into the event management unit, but the way we've planned or designed our focus towards MIDAS is to try and integrate it some way to all our units if we could. And we believe there's the capacity to link it into our sport organisation unit or our sport and the law unit, whether it be in various modules or even as sort of a holistic unit-wide type approach. For instance, we could take a facility management focus on violence in stadia, and that could link into a sport and the law unit or module of learning, so we believe there's scope to develop it. At this stage it's not being developed as broadly as that, but we do believe there's scope to do that.
Inter:	Now, sports management is taught on-campus only, it's not officially taught off-campus. At the Burwood campus, could you tell us a little bit about how you generally go about teaching and assessing student learning in sports management, particularly the units you teach?
Turner:	Basically, we do undertake a series of different mechanisms in terms of assessing students. Some of our early units in particular we do run basic exams at the end of a semester. What we try and do is have some level of applied learning associated with most of our units. For instance in our event management unit, we ask students to put together an event manual. So in groups of 4 or 5, they actually go through the process of constructing an event manual from the bare basics right through to the end-point. Now the only thing they don't do is actually deliver the event. So they've got all the documentation in place relating to all areas that are required for running an event, and that's their operational areas, their marketing areas, administrative and financial areas. And then they put that in a manual ready to go. So someone could actually say, yes we could run this event. We don't go that far, so we tend to do our assessment and I guess our learning in lines of our basic yes, can you sit, complete the exam and pass, through to, well, in a more applied sense, can you take the knowledge that you have and learning that you have and actually present it as you would to an organisation.
Inter:	So in terms of this applied experiential learning flavour to the teaching in part, and I know it will test your memory, Paul, in regard to the origins of the e-simulation MIDAS, but can you recollect and maybe elaborate on some of the key motivations for wanting to do an e-simulation?
Turner:	You are probably testing my memory now a little bit. We felt that obviously there was, and still is, an impetus at Deakin to move towards providing opportunities online to students. We currently don't have to react too greatly in sports management at the moment to that environment but it will move down that pathway. What we felt was, we would, rather than just put, say, basic notes or say a book online, what else could we do that would actually allow students to again apply knowledge rather than just you know read a study guide. So that was our motivation to look at it and say yes the day will come when it may happen. We don't know, but it will come, and we'll have to be in a position to deliver to our students in a more online context so we thought well we would like to be a little bit more pro-active about how we could do that, how best we could do that and we started to think along the lines of an e-simulation that again would allow that applied learning to evolve.
Inter:	Now the concept maybe wasn't a long time in the making but I think that the building of the environment was a fair time in the making. You ended up working with an external web developer, how did you see the relationship and in a sense what you're expected to contribute to the e-simulation, vis a vis that of the web developer?
Turner:	It was a very good experience from our point of view. I think it helped that the developer had worked at Deakin and did know the system and some of the conditions associated with the university environment. From the point of view that, again, he was very realistic about what could and couldn't be achieved as well because we did go through a phase of some grand plans of full-on game type simulation experiences and realised then the cost associated with developing some of those things were prohibitive from our point of view. But our developer was very reasonable, had a very good concept and could work in with the idea also that we had. So we went forward and said look, this is what we'd like to do, can it be done and was very supportive in terms of saying yes it can be done. So yes I'd say the experience was very good from our point of view.
Inter:	And in terms of the concept itself and I know it's very difficult to paint the picture in words of how the MIDAS e-simulation works and we can show that separately in the case, but can you provide an overview of how the thing is structured maybe you know from a student perspective. What does the student do when they get into MIDAS? What's it all about? How does it work?
Turner:	OK, what it is, obviously it's built at this point around the facility management unit that our students complete. What we've done is divided the unit into 6 core modules of learning and each student is required to then come in and work through those 6 core modules. The way we've integrated it into our program, is we then have them in small groups working in each of those modules, but they then have to present information relating to one module specifically. So if we have say, 20 students, 24 students in a class, there might be 4 students in each module, 6 modules, each group will present in detail about one module, but every student will work through all six modules. So as a student coming in to experience it, what we do is we take them through a brief introduction of MIDAS in the initial phase, we then give them a chance to have a bit of a play with the simulation, have a look at it, see how it works, see what it can provide and then we work through and say ok next week you'll be starting Module 1 and we then work through over a period of six to eight weeks through each of the modules and it's done from our point of view in two parts, one in the computer lab and the second part is then in a normal tutorial room, where they then present some of their results, findings, outcomes etc.
Inter:	You've probably touched on this, Paul, in terms of how you integrate it with a classroom teaching environment. A lot of people see the technology as being primarily relevant to off-campus teaching and learning or cross-campus. You're on one campus, but you see the value of the e-simulation being embedded in classroom teaching and learning. Have you got any other comments to make about how you can make it work well?
Turner:	I guess the fact that they can come in, they can sit for an hour in a computer lab and work as a group is quite advantageous from our point of view because they then take, as I say, move to the next phase which is in a tutorial room. Could it still be done completely off-campus? Probably yes, and it would still work and in alliance with say DSO or various other components, it could still be delivered probably fairly comfortably. What we tend to find, though, is that the capacity to get them all together as a group collectively is quite advantageous to them and to us to solve any problems in an on-going capacity, rather than trying to do it by email or solely by email, it means we know week-to-week where they're at, so again we're not necessarily having to monitor that in another fashion and we can do it collectively rather than doing it with 24 students individually. So we know that six groups, four people, where are you at, at this point in time, so it's been quite useful.
Inter:	In terms of the students' experiences of using the technology, I guess the advantageous thing is that you're actually there on the spot and you're observing them interacting with the technology. What are some of the things you've been observing, I mean what do students say, do they verbalize their experiences of working with the technology? What's your sense of their experience of it?
Turner:	They certainly do verbalize it. I mean I guess we get extremes from 'I can't get back in or log back in', right through to 'this is great that we can actually go and have a look at certain websites or wherever they might end up going'. The good thing though I think that has come through, it has given them a chance to at least pin down their group members, because group work can tend to be very, very difficult to undertake in a student environment, gives them the chance to do that. It's a different level of motivation also because it's not the same old tutorial that they're going into and that becomes one of the key comments that we often get, is yes this is different and therefore it's a little bit more interesting. Even if they're not enamoured with the simulation or the web, access or anything else, they seem to tend to be very mindful of the fact that yes, at least it's different to what we normally do.
Inter:	Paul, you can beaver away in your own nook and cranny and think you're doing quite good things in technology. I know you've had an opportunity to show MIDAS externally to your own sports management fraternity or professional associations, what's been the feedback or reaction there beyond Deakin?
Turner:	Very, very positive but again but we haven't really got to the next stage of perhaps sharing it more broadly with some of these people. But most people have been very positive and very enthusiastic about it, in terms of their response. We've showcased at a Sport Management Australia-New Zealand conference and also a North American Sport Management conference and on both occasions, received quite a number of people coming up afterwards and saying, look we'd love to know more about this, how can we integrate or initiate some of this in our own programs and so on. We haven't got to the stage yet where we could comfortably get it out beyond, say, our boundaries at this point of time but there's certainly been quite a degree of interest and I guess in the main the interest also has been from people who have been experimenting or tinkering with the same sorts of things, not necessarily the MIDAS experience but with the e-learning environment. They tend to be the ones who are most receptive, most enthusiastic.
Inter:	In terms of reflecting on what you've done to date and maybe thinking about the possibilities of the future and getting over some other things to do with PhD's completed, do you have a sense of where you might take it and e-learning more generally in sports management within the university?
Turner:	As I've said already, our idea initially was to certainly broaden the concept across our units that we offer, and I think we would still like to do that if the opportunity allowed us to do so. We always had an intention that if it could be successful in the Deakin environment, is there either an opportunity to make it a little bit more commercially available or at the very least, even is there the capacity to perhaps share in some way with other universities. So that was always the intention even say, some four or five years ago. Yes, I think we would still like to move down both of those pathways, to say yes, how can we integrate it in the broader sense with our other units and how can we also perhaps share or commercially develop for use you know in a broader sense.
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