3rd Global Conference The Idea of Education Monday 9th August - Wednesday 11th August 2004 Prague, Czech Republic Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 4: Technology and Education Chair: Linda Alida du Plessis Building and Delivering the Virtual MBA: a Case Study of Organisational Learning Inna Geoghegan & Carmel Moynihan Graduate School of Business, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia The paper presents a case study of the development of an online MBA Programme in the Graduate School of Business (GSB), Curtin University of Technology, Perth , Western Australia. The paper offers a background of the project, illustrates the rationale and vision behind the School’s decision to build online courses and explains the placing of online learning (e-Learning) within the GSB’s core business strategy of ‘Flexible Learning’. To provide a rich contextual framework for the case study of organisational learning, the structure and principles behind the School’s online courses are explained. To illustrate the performance indicators in online learning courses, academic achievements of online post- graduate business students are compared to those in face-to-face courses. The main emphasis of the paper is on organisational learning in terms of the evolution of the teaching faculty as a result of adapting an online method of course delivery. The paper provides an analysis of the stages in the development of the online MBA programme and discusses the journey of the online teaching faculty from innovation to mainstream. The GSB’s business delivery model is presented and its components, such as its leadership drive, management and support structures, project-based mixed teams approach, student feedback loop and continuous learning, are discussed. To illustrate the model, the paper presents the results of a qualitative study of the organisational factors that contributed to the successful building and delivering of online courses and also, the factors that hindered the success, as perceived by the members of the teaching faculty. Finally, emerging and future issues in building and delivering virtual courses are considered and the implications of the School’s experience within the field of online learning are discussed. Supporting Non-native English Students in an Online Postgraduate Course David Catterick Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Dundee, Scotland Language support for non-native English speaking (NNES) international students is well-established within English-medium higher education institutions. De Vita (2000), based on his experience as both an international student and a lecturer in a UK university, identifies a number of “key issues” which such support needs to address: metaphors and idiomatic expressions, discourse style, referencing, and cross-cultural small group interaction. The resulting language-, culture-, or even simply confidence-gap can, it is argued, have a major impact on the student experience and may even mean the difference between success and failure in the degree. With increasing numbers of NNES students joining online degree programs, we need to ask whether the same provision that exists in face-to-face contexts is required in distance mode. An earlier study by the presenter began to address this question through a survey of online teaching staff (n=52). 84% of respondents indicated their belief that NNES students do have differentiated support needs. This paper will report on a collaborative project with the University of Sydney designed to investigate the validity of the previous study’s findings by assessing both the perceived and actual needs of online NNES students. For this ethnographic study, the presenter acted as participant-observer for a student cohort studying on one of Australia’s largest online graduate programmes providing support as and when requested. Support needs were categorised, recorded and then compared with the self-reported needs obtained via Delphi-style consensus discovery. The presentation will summarise the findings from the first phase of the study and suggest ways in which these results might go some way to inform student support considerations on other programmes. Innovation in Teaching: Counselling Skills Lynelle Osburn School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, Australia When we are teaching basic counselling and case-work skills we can do so in ways that de-power and undermine the confidence of our students and act in ways that go against central themes of counselling and adult education: 1.        'strengths based'; 2.        'starting where the client (read 'student') is at'; 3.        respect 4.        safety (not allowing students to unwittingly release sensitive person information) 5.        keeping the environment a warm training one and not allow it to become therapy (adult learning principles) Most educators rebuild student counselling and communication skills and strengths. There is an inefficiency here and a risk that some students can be discouraged and slowed down in their development. Whereas a system of counselling skills training that does not unpack people in the first place can more quickly develop our students with confidence in a non-competitive class-room environment.