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Chris is a lecturer in Operations Management at the Business School. He is head of his this subjects teaching group, a fellow at Hertford college, he teaches MBA and undergraduate students with occasional PhD and Masters supervision. He is also engaged in executive education, continuing education courses and consultancy and Professional Training for the Social Sciences. Additionally, he is involved with fundraising for the university and college, and research
Chris has access to two secretaries who can do pieces of administrative work for him. He finds that the biggest obstacle for administration is having staff that can do slightly more complex tasks than secretarial – in particular “fiddling around with spreadsheets”. For instance Chris did an online survey in survey monkey, the data was exported in a spreadsheet which needed to be put into graphs that he could give to the Social Sciences division. To do this involves some manipulation and reformatting, of the original spreadsheet. His secretary does not have the relevant skills so he has to do it himself.
Chris spends a lot of time organizing meetings, he doesn’t think that this is a task he could delegate to a secretary as they would need to understand priority of attendees, who they are etc. Normally he will arrange meetings via e-mail. The department have been trying to get everyone to use outlook diaries but Chris thinks that people not in the habit of using them, they don’t keep them up to date and he does not use outlook anyway.
The MBA core course in operations management is taught to 230 MBA students. Chris wants the students to “come out with a mindset and thinking about certain business activities in a particular way and have some familiarity with some techniques and ideas”. He believes that MBA teaching about eliciting engagement – case discussions a core part of teaching MBA students. The course is taught via a mixture plenary lectures to all students plus case study session to groups of roughly 60 -70 students. Typically each student will have one plenary lecture and one case study session per week for 8 weeks.
Each lecture is a straight forward “performance style” lecture with power point, video clips and handouts printed out from the power-point that students annotate etc. There is a “sort of attempt at a coherence in terms of a structure over arching from one session to another so there that there’s sort of unfolding story but it only works up to a certain point”. Chris says “I don’t know why I use power-point and I hate power-point” but he has invested a huge a mount of effort in creating a suite of power-point slides, some of which have rudimentary animation in the terms of reveals which allow you to watch a process unfold (see HR) . In his slides he tries to use a lot of visual clues – pictures and images, and tries to minimise bullet points. By maximising the “amount of pictures and diagrams to visual ways of conceiving what I’m talking about” he feels he is adding value to the presentation. Chris explains that there are some things that do not make much sense if you explain them in words but that make a bit more sense if you see an example of it. Visual aids also to help students engage in the material, to frame it and understand it a bit more, it also breaks up the lecture:
- Pictures break up all the words, because I think if you have too many words and slides it makes it hard to digest. I use a lot of video clips too, they serve as pure breathers, just really to break up the flow of the lecture, give people some intellectual relief, something else to look at. Some of them are useful because they are provocative in their own right and, you know, they help get people thinking.
He also tries to use as many “faces” as possible in his slides (e.g. writers or a famous person) – as he thinks this will helps students “locate” what he is talking about.
Chris finds most of the images he uses using Google Images. However he is aware that there are copyright issues with this so he produces a consolidated version of the slides for the handout and to put on the business schools intranet.
Chris gives handouts because the students “demand” them – he would much prefer not to give handouts in some cases as you can not stop people from flipping ahead so what you cant do is have any surprises unless you miss them off the handout, which involves yet more effort. On the occasions he had not give handouts the students they get very upset – largely because they think they’ll forget. Occasionally he experiments with not giving out handouts, e.g. in the PTSS - lectures give handouts of notes rather than a copy of the slides. However he feels that the students really want “paper to take away with them”. He would not like to share resources outside of the bus school, made things available in the past and gone along to other people’s presentations and seen people use and abuse slides that he has crafted. Also, he feels, there is not much merit in looking at the slides if one has not been to lecture.
The case study classes are a “free for all discussion”. Here power-point is not used at all, unless it the class includes a mini lecture. Mostly Chris will us the white board and sometimes projects a spreadsheet.
Chris has used “hot potatoes” and “quia” software to create interactive quizzes. He was involved in a project with the ACDT a couple of years ago to look into the impact of online MCQ formative assessment for student learning. He says he is now “completely convinced at the logic of offering formative assessment as a valuable adjunct to learning”, but in not in the sense that it replaces anything else – it doesn’t make life easier but makes life a bit richer for “some” students and has a very positive effect. It also fulfils a symbolic function for the student in terms of “somewhere I can go if I feel about shaky on a subject”. The tests are no longer used, and this is “absolutely not an IT issue – it’s a human resource issue”. He would have liked to cover a whole year of material and plot what happens near the exam time and how students make use of it at that stage; however, finding the time to continue with the innovation was a major issue. His colleague who originally crafted the questions was coming up to tenure and it was vital that he finished a book – creating the MCQs was a tremendous displacement activity for him as a lot of effort went into creating “good” questions:
Chris discussed his worries over another university teacher who was assisting him in creating formative online MCQs for undergraduate business studies students:
- Well one of the things is just finding the, you know, the time to do it. He was just coming up to tenure at that stage and it was very vital he finished the book. And he is a sort of obsessive, when you saw the things he did, they were all immaculate and beautifully done because he spends lots of time on that sort of stuff, and this could have become a tremendous displacement activity for him. I wanted him to focus on his other work… You know, I wish we had the resources to do more but it’s absolutely not an IT issue, it’s just having the people around to do it.
Additionally Chris Gave up being the undergraduate director and his ability to “call the shots” as to how things were done diminished, his replacement had not interest in innovation. At the time the response from the school was officially “great we can tell people we are doing something on e-learning” but most people were thinking “well that sounds like a lot of work, what do you get out of it?”:
- [B]ecause I think it is something that that you're doing for just pure educational benefit and not even for all students, many of my colleagues would say well why bother. But generally it just reflects of course that there is no instrumental value in interesting in teaching because no one appraises you or evaluates you on teaching.
Although the project is not running anymore he says that it was not wasted as he now “understands the value in that component”(formative MCQs).
Chris has also set up pages of web resources that students can use although he has no idea how much these are being used. He also puts bits of video that he does not have time to use in lectures on the intranet. Additionally he has created FQAs pages on the intranet in word. When students e-mail him a question he adds it with an answer.
Interestingly he thought that the MBA students would be a prime target for discussion boards but says “we’ve made discussion boards available but they really don’t get used – may be they have their other means of software networking that they think are more amenable”.
He takes tutorials with first year undergraduates. He does not spend much time preparing these as he has been teaching them a long time. Students get given an essay title and readings as a suggesting starting point either to hand in before tutorial or bring along a long on the day to read out and discuss.
Each student gets given a pack with a long reading list at the start of the year. Reading lists are a philosophical debate within the school. Chris likes to give long reading lists, rather than short ones to encourage them in the idea that this is a resource for them to pick stuff up from – “he idea that there is a narrow cannon you must read does not really make sense for the subject”. However, students complain about long reading lists as they still think that they have to read everything on it. He does not use bibliographic software, and has never found them to be more useful than a list in word. Reformatting reading lists is a task can give his secretary.
The reading lists are also available on the school intranet with hotlinks to online articles. Chris believes that hot linking is a waste of time, even though it does save students a few moments it means that many of them do not use the library searching software. When students search they generally use Google, or sometimes Google Scholar, which gives them “a very distorted range of stuff”. He says it seems that they search on Google or Google Scholar and look down the first 20 outputs and if there is nothing that is immediately the answer to their problems they say that “there is nothing on . . .” even if Google has delivered 15,000 hits. Chris regards searching as a scholarly skill and that it is not taught well to the students, even research students. A long searching exercise is needed to map reality, 3 or 4 hours is needed to show people the skills needed, but it is difficult to engage people for that long.
Chris has also used IT to create formative assessments for the quantitative aspects of Operations Management. He feels it is difficult to do a quantitative exercise where the students actually engage. He has taught himself VBA programming in excel and mail merge to generate individualised question sheets which the students are asked to try before the class. He also generates individualized answer sheets which he gives out in class and the students are asked to mark each other’s work, he then collects in a summary. He feels that this is more effective than working through solutions on the board (which may be wrong) as it is more engaging. They can discuss the method for answering the questions but they have to do their own question to do work through. He’d like to extend this into giving students a whole work book.