Right, Good Stuff, Yeah

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This is part of a project that’s headed by Sally Fincher who’s a National Teaching Fellow down in Kent, and she’s a computer scientist. And a large part of the project is about developing a method for, I suppose, sharing teaching practice that she calls ‘Disciplinary Commons’.

Right, good stuff, yeah.

But sitting alongside that is a longitudinal study of… we’ve got about 15, possibly 20 people we’re hoping to talk to a couple of times a year over the next couple of years…

Hmmm hmm.

…essentially trying to get at what’s made a difference in their teaching, where has, if you like, ‘teacherly skills’ been evidenced, what they consist of, these sorts of things, and looking at change over a couple of years.

Hmmm hmm. Right.

So ideally if we can focus on a course that you teach…

Right, regular…

…that you are likely to be teaching…

Hmmm hmm.

…for the next couple of years, and if you’re prepared to be…

Hmmm hmm.

…you know…

Yeah. So share…

…have some sort of interaction…

…a couple of times a year. Now at least one of those will be an interview…

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…but the other one might be a questionnaire or some other sort of activity, or it might be a second interview…

…over the next couple of years.

And also I was thinking of drawing a timeline, if you like, so we can help identify where…

Hmmm hmm.

…in the time, particularly now, you know, if this is us now…

Yeah, okay.

…but going back and…

Back as well as forward?

…forward, yeah.

Okay. Fair enough.

And the idea of this first interview…

…is a sort of baseline interview to find out the sort of context you work in…

…context within GCU, who else is involved in the course, who you have to talk to…

…when you make the decisions about the course…

Right.

…these sorts of issues…

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…if that’s okay.

And I imagine, probably pretty soon now because I think you’re probably the last of the 15 to 20…

Right, sure.

…we’ll be coming back for the first of another…

…set of interviews, if that’s okay.

So first of all we’re looking for a module that you teach that displays, if you like, your teacherly instincts or where your teaching skill has made a difference.

No, I’ve never made a difference. ((laughs)) Those ones… the ones that are most reliably mine and won’t be taken off me in the next year or two will be the AI modules.

Right, okay.

I have done some sort of innovative things. I mean that’s the Second Life thing I did with Kathy in her competition was embedded into that module and I’ll be doing that again next semester, semester B it’s gone to now. So… it’s not the same module but it’s a related one. So I think that’s the most reliable one. The other module I’m leading is on Teaching Programming which is something I think is vitally important for Computing so I have an interest in the psychology of programming and trying to work out what it is that’s stopping the kids from picking it up. So I mean there’s some interesting kind of work to be done there and, if I get round to it, I’ll try and do some this semester, you know. I was thinking of those efficacy style questions which we discussed before, and I tried some of them in both modules, the AI one last year for the Second Life efficacy and also the

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Programming one. Unfortunately it appears I’ve lost most of the data from the Programming one because I use Moodle.

Yes, and I turned off the thing which said ‘Automatically evacuate people’ or ‘expel people’ after six weeks, or whatever that period is, but it did it anyway.

Oh dear.

So it’s lost: 90% of all the students and, as far as I can gather, all their data as well. I can’t believe how dumb that is for them to do that. It’s a kind of, really irritating, and I can’t believe how dumb I was not to back it up ((laughs)) because I didn’t think it would do that, so that’s my fault as well, you know, so I don’t have that data. But anyway that’s just by the by because I know you’re interested in self- efficacy. So there is that possibility to use this Programming module, but I think the other one would be… on balance I think the other one would be better because it’s definitely my module. Talking about context, the Programming one is a second level, it’s a second year module, and a lot of people have some kind of investment in that or they think they do because it’s about programming, it is important, it’s a core subject; other things later on do depend on the students being able to program.

So people have an interest and they stick their nose in to my module and then they start interfering and telling me I should change whatever programming language, I should do this; mostly because I’m a nice guy, or try to be, I sort of say, “Yeah, alright,” even though I don’t agree with all their decisions; but this means that, you know, because I think a happy ship is the best kind of ship, and whether it’s going very fast or not is by far the secondary concern as far as I’m concerned. So I let people have their say, and maybe it’s not best for the students but you have to look after your staff and your colleagues as well in a sense.

So because of this… ‘interference’ would be a nasty word for it, but because of this ‘distributed concern’ I can’t sort of just lay down the law and say… I mean I probably could, I can actually, but I don’t want to do that. So other people… that is to say ‘random causes’ are going to come in from time to time and they’ll have a little meeting about this and they’ll make a decision and I have to… or I will say that I will agree to go and change something which is not really relevant to what you

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might… and might interfere with something… It’s relatively less stable, I’ve got less control over that, and I think therefore the AI one, which other people just don’t care about so much, even the ones who should, that I can more or less do much more of what I want. Also it’s more own area and it’s useful if you’re teacher, you know, if you’re enthusiastic about your area and so on you want… you’re more motivated to get people to understand things. So for all of these reasons I think you could say I’m possibly a better teacher on the AI than on the other things.

Okay, well let’s…

We’ll go with that one.

…let’s go with the AI one.

Yeah, okay.

Is that a… you tell me a bit about it. Is it first year, third year?

No that one has gone back to third year; it was fourth year. Similar material has been done at MSc level. So it’s… because it’s been me who’s been teaching I’ve been doing it more or less the same, or similar subjects, for the last few years at whatever level; I just pitch it at a slightly different level. Now it’s gone to our new programme coming… no, it’s not our new programme coming through, it’s the last of the old programme. It changes so fast it’s hard to keep up really. This is… so it’s now Level Three and our new programme, our new style of doing first years and sort of holding for students and so on, stuff they did last year, so they’re up to Level Two now. But this is Level Three, so it’s the old style students, it’s called Game AI, it’s actually the first time this module’s running. I know it’s ridiculous to say it’s old already, but there you go. ((laughs))

((laughs)) So they’re starting in Semester Two?

Yes. Next semester, so we’ve got all semester now to prepare it, module’s in February, yeah.

That’s where it’s going to start.

Hmmm hmm. February 2010.

And where…

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But similar ones have run before.

Similar ones have run.

Yeah, so you can more or less call it the same module if you like. Effectively the same Honours students will be dropping back to take this Level Three module because it contains some Level Three ones.

Right.

So we’re catching the same Honours students that would’ve done the AI module before: this is now called Game AI, there’s a slightly different focus on video games. So to be able to still have the Second Life stuff in there for example so that it’s kind of the same module. Okay.

And so we’ve got a semester to…

Yeah, prepare that.

…to prepare it.

Okay. So I guess what sorts of things are you thinking about at the moment or likely to be…?

There’s always new topics you can bring in. Let’s say, although this is kind of my module and it’s the one, you know, the subject matter I know best in both senses, I know it better than I know anything else, and I know it better than anyone else knows it as well, than my colleagues here, so it really is kind of my module, but that means unfortunately that I’ve always kind of been able to wing it. If I’ve had other things to do, other modules to prepare for a first time, they get priority, even though this is, in a sense, my favourite kind of subject, and I actually put more effort, because I think I have to, into other subjects. So you get this paradoxical situation where my chief module, and I’m the main guy who teaches this kind of stuff – there’s another professor who does as well though – I come out with materials which don’t look professional, don’t do bullet point kind of PowerPoint slides. I’ve got some like that and I’ve got different kinds, I’ve got OHP lectures, base lectures and… I think I’ve told you about some of this before, ill-prepared notes which I talk over.

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So if I drew a sort of… I’m just thinking, if I drew a sort of urgency curve…

…it would look like that or something…

It’s usually progress.

You know more or less when you need…

Yes, yes.

…that, okay. ((laughs))

Although it is… you know, you should really… I know that’s not the right way to… everything round here happens last minute. I suppose everything everywhere does, even when you try and plan for things better for other people’s benefit, they still won’t do anything. Not just students, I mean staff, they won’t do anything ‘til the last minute because… in a way it’s rational because this thing might never happen so why prepare?

Right, yes.

And the modules do happen of course, though you’d be surprised how many we ((clicks fingers)) drop. So there is that problem, and when you’ve got this and this every year, when you’ve got it regularly, this is really not what you should be doing. Yeah, I recognise that, so I do sort of keep snippets in scrapbooks of links to web pages and things that I mean to bring in.

So does it sort of look like that?

Your activity sort of…

((0:11:55.2?))

It is a bit on a back burner like that; I’m always sort of spot… on the lookout for teaching support… just little bumps, you know, but that is… And then sometimes

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this curve is so much against here – because I’ve got something else to do the same semester or whatever – that this stuff doesn’t get filtered in even, so that can happen. So it’s hard to get that balance right. That’s just a matter of general teaching and preparation, nothing to do with technology; you’re interested more in it.

Well, no I’m not particularly.

Okay. Alright.

Not for this project, not particularly.

Hmmm. How you manage your pedagogical preparation and stuff like that.

It’s a really key skill, yeah, so I think the best advice I know from that is the Nihil Nimus approach from Boice. If you don’t know that book it’s really good for academics who… He’s written a couple: as about Professors as Writers I think, and… I think it’s Robert Boice, yeah, and Nihil Nimus which is obviously dog Latin for “nothing to excess” I think so what he’s saying is “spread it out.” So prepare early and not very well, you know, adequate is good enough, because you end up doing less than adequate if you’re not careful so you might as well… So he proposed this as a way… he observed this by studying new faculty teaching at his university, some state university, and he separated them into two groups, the successful and the less successful ones, and the successful ones, he just abstracted their work patterns and then accentuated them and tried to teach the others. So in other words some people are naturally quite good organisers or planners or whatever, and he found that those skills were reproducible, were transferable, and it wasn’t just for preparing courses; it’s also about doing research and writing up papers. So the same philosophy, if you like, applies across the board and I think that’s a very good…

If you could send me the reference that would be interesting.

Yes, certainly.

Okay. Just sort of in general then, getting away from this…

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…and back to my real interview schedule…

…just – and this is a background for the ongoing study – can you say a bit about how long you’ve been teaching and then how long you’ve been teaching this subject, this module?

I started teaching in 2000 really, a funny career, becoming an RA in different things in other places and not really teaching, you know, except in small ways which I wouldn’t really count. As a lecturer probably first proper job is this one really, only nine years ago. And teaching this subject, most of that I… I mean it’s been a fairly regular kind of repeating subject for me since I came here, sort of AI one, then a two and then… the modules changed a few times formally but it’s been there more or less consistently for say seven or eight years, so it really should be in a state of better preparation for the students than it is. I should say it’s semi-deliberate that I give them, let’s say impoverished or degraded materials, and that’s because I want to almost force them to write their own notes up so that they will understand and not just sit there passively; that’s what I don’t like about handouts, I think a lot of people don’t. So I’ve tried various things over the years: ‘fill in the blank’ kind of sheets where I give them most of what they need to know except the vital things, and they have to listen to fill that in, so it saves the hand. I’ve done various things like that but…

And the students are sort of doing stuff here almost…

Hmmm hmm.

…to fill in your gaps that you’ve left deliberately.

Yes, that’s kind of why I haven’t put more effort into sprucing up the materials. I’m really actually quite worried in this context, in this university, that I think it’s common, right up to Oxbridge and MIT, and people all the way are basically complaining about their students, Generation X, short attention-span, can’t be bothered to pick up a pen, that kind of… don’t know what a book is any more, you know, these sorts of things you hear people saying which I think are largely unfair. People are often down on students just because they’re… basically they’re a vulnerable social group so you can say anything you want about them, and it’s

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their job to respect their elders ((laughs)) but I think there’s not much more to it than that in some cases, you know. But the reality is they are under lots of pressures outside university so I feel sorry for them for that. They can’t devote as much time to their studies that we could and so it’s just not a fair comparison. And then also this widening access to university and so on, you’ve got to make all kinds of concessions to not lose people.

Taking this ‘happy ship’ metaphor, don’t want to chuck people overboard, you know, if I can help it, and try and help everyone stay afloat, that’s the most important rule here, that’s Rule #1 one to try to make sure no-one fails because they’ll ruin their education that way. Rule #2 is you can look after the best and the brighter students and try and make sure they’re stimulated, but that has to come after all this, in this place Rule #1, whereas in Cambridge it would be the other way round. So for all these reasons and knowing the various pressures students are under, some members of staff, like me, are loathe to spoon-feed them; that’s not what university’s about anyway, it is about getting you to stand on your own two feet and be able to put your own spoon in your own mouth ((laughs)) that’s it. We’ll put the spoon in their hand but that’s as far as it goes, you know.

So mollycoddling students or trying to get them through too much means you’re undermining them and they’re going to start depending on your spoon. I mean it’s kind of brain-dead obvious everything I’m saying right now. I’m just saying it is a concern and you have to trick… you have to try all these little tricks to get the students to do some work and I think it’s valuable time in the lecture, it’s really valuable time, so it’s a waste of time to have them sitting there bored or looking out the window. It’s the only time you can guarantee, if they’re actually in front of you, you’ve kind of got them there: if you can’t teach them then, if you’re just going to tell them for example what the syllabus is and expect them to go home and read a book, you’re failing them, you’re letting them down, and some of my colleagues do have that attitude, you know, that you can’t teach anything in a lecture. All you can do is tell them more or less what’s important, what’s less important; it’s kind of vague stuff, and hope they’ll study on their own. Well, I think that’s a waste of an opportunity.

So anything you can try and do to get the students to stay awake and pay attention in the lectures and make things memorable for them so they can recall them without too much effort later; sometimes I tell them how you should take notes. I

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know the Effective Learning Service does that but they don’t go to that, and that kind of thing can be brought in to your lectures as well. So they’re constantly focused and you keep refocusing them on their learning and so they’re asking themselves, “Am I getting this? Is this at the level I’m supposed to understand for the exam?” And this reflection is of course quite a beneficial thing.

Hmmm. So you’re saying in lectures what you’re trying to facilitate is their learning process.

Rather than…

Yeah, give them materials and books or something. Yeah, I’m really dead against that but there are these computing philosophies here and some people do go that way: they give them thick books which tells you every click, every icon you have to click on, and I think that just makes them weak because they don’t even have to work out which menu items to search for. They’re really reduced to the level of not even the intelligence of a monkey. So maybe it gets them through in a sense and helps them do their coursework, and makes them maybe feel like they’ve done something, and in a way they have done something, but not as much as they could’ve done, and you should challenge them more than that and you should get more out of them so they can feel more proud of themselves in the end. We’re not… it’s not crumbs from the rich man’s table; it’s the only education they’re going to get, this university education. They’re not going to go to another university later on, hardly any of them. This is it. It’s their experience of university life and it’s meant to be a good thing, it’s your duty to make it the best you can for them, and not just try and get them through like they’re also-rans ready to go down a mine or something. We don’t even have any mines any more, you know. So I really don’t like that patronising, not patronising softening attitude which actually puts the students down.

This brings us I think quite nicely onto the next thing which is... if you can tell me a bit about the context, the history and background of this module.

Okay. Well you don’t want to know the history and background of AI and why it wasn’t called AI for a time, it was called IKBS, and you probably know some of that.

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But I suppose the most important things you want to know about the module is what it’s for and what is its place in the wider curriculum, the programme.

Okay, so it’s meant to be, as far as other people are concerned, AI is an important technology, if you want to call it that, it’s part science, part engineering context, it’s not easy to define really, it’s a bit of a mixed bag of techniques and stuff and philosophy and things, which is good because as a teacher you can take the bits which are most appealing to you and you can be more enthusiastic about them. And it’s also good because you can reach the back markers in a way; I’ve managed to get most people through most years though there are occasional failures, but although it is a hard subject, you’ve got such a lot of leeway that you can teach it in a way that everyone can make a contribution, so you don’t have to fail people. It’s not like ((0:22:23.9?)) field of mathematics or something where you’ve got to learn this or you fail and there’s no opportunity for writing essays ((laughs)) as though essays are somehow easier. In a way of course they are easier than the hard sciences, they’re softer, so there’s a leeway for interpretation and you can award marks for other things than getting things right, sometimes.

So you can do that in AI, you can protect the back marker students. They can come in, they can still be stimulated, but the front students, the most ambitious ones can really love it because you’re dealing with fundamental questions, at least if you bring that out about the nature of man, what is our mind anyway, what is intelligence? And I bet you didn’t know that some of the things you think are not intelligent at all are actually very intelligent. Some of the things you think you’re doing which are pretty smart are nothing; computers can do far better than you, you know, simple arithmetic and so on, it’s not smart at all, why do you think that’s smart? There’s all these… it’s full of paradox which goes right… it’s very philosophical, it goes right to the heart, to the nature of man himself if you like. I mean it really does make you rethink our place in the universe and all of that, you know, you can bring that side out of it, and some of them really love that. And then there’s the philosophy and there’s the science fiction: are robots going to take over the world, and they love that, of course. So you can’t always tell it’s science fiction, maybe it’s the future that hasn’t happened yet.

So there are these resonant kind of strands to the story you’re telling which can get people quite excited, they love bits and pieces. I give them a lot of leeway so

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they can go and do coursework on a topic within AI that’s of interest to them: some of them love robots, and some of them love cars so they work out how AI’s going to change the way we drive our cars on the roads in the future and so on. So I can at that level, Level 3, Level 4 Honours, give them a lot of scope so they can accommodate their own interests. All these tricks if you like to get them engaged and yet be able to give them assessment marks doing something.

Why does it fit within the programme?

Only that thing about it being important in the world today.

That’s really the lip service that’s paid to it, and beyond that there isn’t much attention given to it. So it’s quite different as far as programme organisers and people like that are concerned; because it’s an exiting module nothing else is going to depend on it – well, except life but, you know, we’re not concerned with life at university – that’s not our responsibility any more once you leave.

Does it have any prerequisites, so you have to vary a course if they…?

Yeah, Programming and that’s about it really, as long as you can program. It’s just too difficult to do it without any programming.

Yeah, okay. So coming on to more detail about the context, things like decision about the textbook and the topics and the order of coverage, are those yours to make?

Yeah, I don’t consult with anyone. There isn’t anyone really who could give me… I mean there’s other subjects I teach where there are various other experts around; I do ask them for advice on C# and the other programming and so on, but there isn’t anyone to advise me on that. I’m kind of an expert in that field anyway, I don’t need that, so I just do what I want in that module; it’s quite a different character from the earlier levels from that point of view, although I’ve been like that before in other modules at Level 1 and 2, no problem. We have very little oversight actually in our school; I know that’s different in other schools, very bureaucratic, we’re the other extreme from say Psychology I think.

That’s rather nice, isn’t it?

It is nice, yeah. You wonder about…

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So when you made those decisions on things, is there any one in particular that you made first when you were thinking about textbooks or topics or order of coverage or anything?

No. No. And it never was like that. I took a first module as it was first designed from somebody else, designed this next version of it.

So when you designed the next version, how far in advance did you start thinking about that?

That started by whatever the administrative and bureaucratic process are that we have. So there’s a programme supposed to be coming on stream, somebody will ask me to design the AI module. It’s happened in the past and they’ve forgotten even to do that, they’ve forgotten even to include AI in Games course, which is ridiculous but it’s happened and I had to keep saying, “You should have some AI in there somewhere.” And eventually they said, “Oh, I suppose we should.” So I had to sort of prompt people and it came in that way, this Game AI one. And then I just make up a reasonable sounding curriculum and syllabus on the spot.

So does it have to go into the courses catalogue or anything?

It does, yeah.

So it happens way back in… does it?

Well that will be typically at the programme… the PPP, what does that stand for? The Programme Prospectus Proforma or something. Anyway that’s the approval document for the whole programme: you list the modules, you include the module descriptors and that’s about as much detail as you put in as far as that goes, a little bit about who’s going to teach it and you have the resources for it, and that’s it. Then that goes through the programme approval stage, and if it does get approved then that module will have to be… so that’s about two pages in length, that’s the description.

And then it’s sort of the previous year or…?

Oh that would be… yes, it’s a pretty short run-up time in Computing; it’s very, very fast.

Right, okay, so it’s actually here.

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It can be about a year, yeah, when you start the approval. It takes a year to get the programme approved, and then it’s whatever the calendar year is and when it’s going to start kicking off. So you will actually prepare your module… it could be like this, it could be right before the start of the semester. You could get just weeks or you could get several months, yeah. The key decision is the timetabling, who’s going to be teaching the module, so you wouldn’t prepare anything unless you’re going to be teaching yourself. You have to wait for the timetables to come out.

So you… if it’s something you think you’re wanting to teach, you then put it in for programme approval rather than it being approved before any of these get to the… they don’t approve it then say, “Oh, by the way, would you come and teach it?”

Yeah, it happens either way.

Right, okay.

They will ask somebody to do the module descriptor if there isn’t somebody already proposing or pushing it forward, which is unusual. For someone like me to go along and say, you know, “You should be thinking about AI in there,” is unusual. Normally they’re supposed to get all those decisions right, the programme organisers, and they enlist or commission if you like as a sort of process, tendering process. It’s not competitive, they just nominate people to write the module descriptor and then they… or someone else will actually deliver the module, but they’re supposed to be domain experts able to pick out what’s relevant, what isn’t relevant, what should go in here, what the curriculum for this module should be in the syllabus.

So it’s the module descriptor.

And half the time they end up teaching it but half the time it’s going to be somebody else, roughly 50:50, something like that. Yeah, so it’s a general… I would say it’s not very… there’s not much oversight. I don’t even think this programme approval process is very in-depth. I don’t think they really look at…

So at that stage you’ve written the module descriptors but then there’s very little oversight or anything. Do you think about things like order of topics and coverage and things?

Hmmm hmm.

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Have you got any sort of sequence or do you just sort of evolve intuitively or how do…?

It is a sort of sequence, it is. If you’re talking about this module in particular, ((Psalm?)) of course dictate a sequence to you because there’s a lot of interdepen… you have to learn things before you learn other things, but because of the nature of… because of chosen to do AI as a kind of a forest rather than one really big tree, lots of trees, smaller ones, and so I’ll highlight topics so they can talk semi-intelligently about a particular field of AI down the pub, but maybe not to a world expert knowledge. I just want to give them tasters, a sort of bluffer’s guide if you like but over several selected highlights or topics from within AI, so it’s lots of mini-topics which can be reordered if I need to. There is a sort of logical order though because the more logical stuff comes first. I mean literally in logical order and reasoning and so on, research techniques which underpin a lot of stuff, but mostly I can reorder things if I want to. I don’t reorder them on the fly like that, I don’t have much call to, I tend to put things towards the end which could be more, maybe slightly more speculative or future oriented, so kind of hot topics sort of thing will go towards the end, and some of the more sophisticated things will… because I’ll know the students better by then and what they’re able to take and absorb.

So it sounds like you’re making a sort of rough decision somewhere about here, about the ordering of the topics, but actually here during teaching the course you might reorder that according to the students. Is that…?

Yeah. They are for some reason different from year to year. Well they have different interests for sure and can choose different course topics as well so you can fit in with that as well.

Okay, I think we’ve sort of more or less covered the next ones which are, “Does anyone else teach on the module?” and “What are the things you can change without consulting others?”

It only happened once where I had to share a module with the other professor I was telling you about. I don’t know why we did it this way: he was teaching one AI module, I was teaching… because we had two at that point ((0:32:31.4?)) and I was teaching this one, but he said he’d rather teach… ‘cause there was some new material and everything, so he’d rather teach half of the stuff that I was teaching and in exchange I could do that part that he wasn’t too comfortable with, so we…

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they were both going in the same semester and we sort of just changed over halfway through. I don’t know why he thought that but it worked okay actually, it worked okay, and I took it as an opportunity to work with him on this. But that was the only time when I had to sort of follow someone else’s agenda to any extent really. Usually I just do… yeah, it sounds like a dream job doesn’t it; you get to decide what you’re going to teach, everyone says, “Yeah, whatever,” to whatever you put down on a piece of paper; they approve anything, what I can gather, as long as you satisfy some certain formal markers like the numbers add up. I don’t… you know, the quality control here isn’t very intense, let’s put it that way, but we have to be like that because we have to keep changing so fast, we have to keep up with trends, and in a way it’s good because it does liberate teachers to teach the way they see fit. And giving people responsibility like that works for students too; it does help them develop, so it’s got its good side as well. There’s probably some bad quality hiding somewhere in the system which we don’t find.

So when it comes to things you can change without consulting others, this sounds like…

It’s not everything but there are some formal limits. So you get your module descriptor and our rules are – which are reasonably generous I think – you can change… Firstly the main locus of quality control is the External Examiners College, so those are the people really, if I’m trying to persuade about something: first my colleagues, yes, but they’ll be swayed if the external… so I have to make the case to the External… and that may be a domain expert in AI. So there is that quality control, gatekeeper, and that person has to be consulted whenever you change… for some reason it’s the formal requirements, like if you want to change the assessment loadings from 50:50 coursework and exam to say 60:40 or 30:70, something like that, or you want to change the exam from a three-hour to a two- hour exam, you and I might not think that’s a big change, but because it has an impact on other parts of university, the Exams Office, the External Examiners have to be consulted on these things. Whereas some of the curriculum evidence…

So is that again back here some time that you have to…? What’s the lead in time for…?

Yeah, to changing a module and getting it approved by the examiner, then you have to go through all the bureaucratic process and that does take months. You have to give the person a fair, you know, a chance to look at it, and then there may be comments or you may want to incorporate those and have another round, so that’s months to get that done. So you should not make significant… what they

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call significant changes to the module within say the six months before it starts running. But you can make other changes. You can make changes which are accepted just by yourself signing them off to the module, including the curriculum and the syllabus, you know, which are quite major things really, including up to about a third. So, you know, if your syllabus consists of 12 full weeks of topics and every one’s a different topic, you can change up to four of them, just get rid of them and put in four different things, or just get rid of them and don’t put in anything else, I suppose, and no-one will ask you to justify it or double-check it.

And you can do that on the fly…

…or when you’re… at the beginning of the course.

Well no, at the beginning of the course, when it actually starts and you’ve given the students what we call a module handbook, which includes all of this kind of information in it, the syllabus and what they can expect, then it’s unfair to change it, you know, but you can be pretty close to the start of the semester before you do that. You can tell students in advance, “I haven’t decided whether I’m going to teach you neural networks or genetic algorithms in week 10 or 11,” and that’s okay, you know, that’s why I leave some of those topics ‘til the end, because we can write module descriptors by saying things like, “Selected topics from the world today,” and that’s why I put that stuff. So actually, if you can change a third, if you think about it this way, you can change a third of your module this year and a third of it for next year and a third of it… you can completely revamp the whole module in three years without consulting anyone.

Yeah, okay. And it comes up for programme reapproval every…

Yes, n years, I don’t know.

N years, right.

It doesn’t often happen.

Longer than three?

Longer than the lifetime of computing, because we change everything so fast, yeah. So I’ve never had that. Oh no, it does. It does. I’ve had a couple of primary

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improvements. No, the other time, when I will see it as good practice I think, is for you to put the pack together for your external examiner with the exams, you know, when he or she… it’s always been a he in my case, for these ((0:38:05.9?)) areas of the course, looks through your exams, your coursework, and you give of course a coursework specification so he can see what the students are being asked to do as well as what they’ve done, exam, paper; has the scripts from the students, examples; high, middle, low, borderlines as well; and the module descriptor, and I think when I get round to it I put a matrix in which shows the learning outcomes of the module descriptor and the questions on the exam along columns and which ones tick which boxes in the exam and then the resit exam to show the coverage. And those sorts of things externals like very much because they lose touch really with the modern… they don’t know the course as well as you do so they need to see the module descriptor again and what is it supposed to be teaching them again, and that can change from year to year, and they won’t maybe notice the changes, but it doesn’t matter because you’re giving them the fresh one every time. I think that’s good practice which I don’t always do.

((laughs)) So were there things that you can’t change?

Yeah, sometimes apparently silly trivial things you can’t change, because it has to go through the whole process and requires a new module code; that becomes actually an entirely new module. Now those things are… if you decide to drop the exam and go to 100% coursework or something, that’s not just changing a little bit of the balance between coursework and exam, it’s significantly changing the assessment framework for that module. And that does have implications for other modules because you might find that, for example, you’re the last modules running an exam so, if you drop it and go to coursework, that means all your students for the whole year don’t have an exam to sit, which opens up plagiarism possibilities and really undermines your quality control, and that’s only going to be visible at the level of the whole programme because you don’t know what’s happening in all the other modules ‘cause we’re not informed of that, so the programme organiser has oversight. And so there are reasons why changing some of these formal things do have these implications; they have to go through a bit of a bureaucratic paper chase to get things changed and that means you do need a lot of time for apparently trivial things. But on the whole, because of its rule of being able to change a third yourself without it being considered “significant” enough to bring in an external examiner, that’s actually I think quite a lot of trust is being shown for

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the module leaders in a lot of ways given, and that’s pretty much what you need, all you need. You should sort out the other stuff about the exams and so on, you should do that anyway. So if you’re doing a module here a year in advance, well that’s when you discover that you’ve got the wrong balance or loading so you should apply to have it changed then, and it may take a whole year because you’ve got to change the module catalogue and everything; it’s alright, you know that after the module that’s the best time to make decisions. So I don’t find it a problem.

Okay, great. So what particular materials, techniques, approaches have you introduced into the module and why did you choose them?

Materials? You mean like books, textbooks and things?

Yes, I guess.

I’m always on the lookout for textbooks and never happy with them. They’re either these thousand page tomes which are really intimidating for the students or they’re somebody’s quirky view and I’ve got my own quirky views and there’s nothing wrong with being quirky but you’ve got to agree with it at least, you know, and textbooks are full of mistakes; they’re always rapidly produced to try and hit the market and it takes a while to find… I just don’t have them; there isn’t really a great… so I don’t use…

Okay, so shall we move on to techniques and approaches?

Yeah. Well we’ve covered some of that stuff, so I tell, as it’s ‘chalk and talk’ if you want to call it, the approach. I just try and reason things through with them. If students can see you reasoning then they will be just right up with you, follow you if you don’t go too fast, and then you’re getting them to reason through the problems. You see the problems first and then try candidate solutions and then see how the solution matches the problem. That’s the sort of arc, you know, a bit like a Shakespearean play, you’ve got the opening, you’ve got the middle and you’ve got the end, and it comes back to the beginning. That’s not a… I wouldn’t call that a technique. There’s various things like what I’ve told you already about overhead projector slides, getting to write notes: a couple of years ago I tried to get the AI class to write their own lecture notes and I gave them some advice on how to do that and how to share, so they had a phase when they wrote their own bit, phase when they came together and there was a critique of each other’s material,

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phase when they would give it to me and I would check it and correct any mistakes, so that was their incentive for doing it you see, so I could make sure they had a complete set of notes which would suit them for the exam. So I was helping them to write their notes without writing it for them. That worked pretty well the first year, didn’t work very well the second year when they even had some assessment of it, giving them credit for doing it made them do it less well.

Interesting.

It was interesting. I don’t know if that’s the right reason but just a correlation, I just noticed that happen.

So have you now abandoned that or are you trying it again?

I don’t know what to do about it now. I’m going to try it again but… because it did work well the first year. They were good students though, I mean two of them were star students, and that has an effect, because I had them working in teams. You only need one of them in a team, you know. And these other things happen, you can praise this team for doing really well because they’d worked on their notes and you could see how much effort they’d put into it, and there’s a class quality note pack for their exam. And you say that in the lecture and the others are all pricking up their ears thinking, “So what we’ve done then isn’t good enough for the exam.” Well, so then that brings them on, you see. So all of these social effects happen which means it’s quite hard to track down the cause for something like that happening, one year it works, the next year it doesn’t, you know.

Thinking about it, is that whether you’re going to do that a decision you have to make before you start the course, before you know the students and their abilities, or is it one because you need to allow the time for? Or is it one you can make a few weeks into the course once you’ve picked out whether there are any star students who’re going to make it work or not?

It is. I haven’t been so much depending… and now I will be looking out for star… and I will take that into account as a possible course, whether there are star students there and whether that will make this more likely to work or not. But I’m in two minds about it; I’ll probably still be in two minds about it on week one and I’ll… It does help me quite a lot to see the students and who they are and their different levels of enthusiasm and who really came here to do this module,

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because there are some like that, and then I can ride the horse halfway through, you know, just like a jockey riding a horse. The jockey doesn’t stand there and just whack the horse on the backside and say, “Off you go,” you know; you’ve got to stay on it and steer it all the way through, so I do, probably wrongly, I do depend on that maybe. When I say wrongly, probably too much. I could prepare things better but I just depend on my responsiveness to the situation. I don’t know why, I just do that.

I think that’s very fair.

It’s just a style thing, I suppose. There are other people, I respect, who do prepare a lot better than I do, and I know it gives them a stress-free semester relatively, so I can see why they do it, that’s great.

Okay, so how do students learn…

That’s a big question. ((laughs))

…AI in this module? ((laughs))

How do they learn it? Well it is…

And again this is about… I don’t know whether it’s about activities and things and…

Oh right. Well it’s basically coursework and trying to get… what they’re supposed to do is take notes during lectures, make sure they understand at least the story at the level of detail I’m putting it to them so they can reproduce that. I want them to understand, not memorise, because understanding is a better way to remember things, you know, as the saying goes. I try to get that across to them. I tell them at the beginning it is a different module from any other modules they’ve done because of the style in which I teach it. It is more grown-up if you like; it does expect them to manage their learning better. You can give them that warning: it goes in one ear and out the other quite often. How do they learn? I guess there are so many different kinds of student in there I can’t really generalise, you know. They’re supposed to listen, they’re supposed to understand. In the labs they do coursework which is not very related to the lecture material, only on some topics; I think they probably learn more from that, to be honest, because they’ve done the research themselves into one topic in some detail and they’ve had to prepare it to the point where they can present it to me, so it’s a kind of literature survey type

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thing or a software demonstration in which there’s a viva. I mean I’m asking them to see if they understand what they’re talking about. They need to do a different bit and they have to depend on each other; they’re not going to let each other down. All of these things mean that basically I’m better motivated to do that part. And the exam motivates people through fear more than anything, which isn’t a great motivator, it’s just we use it because it’s better than nothing and because exams mean that you can’t cheat, so that’s the other reason we use exams. So if they don’t learn that well probably I don’t know how you could objectively measure that for the exam as opposed to that particular coursework they do which of course is much broader, they learn more stuff for the exam and they do retain some of it: it’s always depressing in the exams with the question answers, you know, what can you say?

David it’s three o’clock; do you want to go to your other thing or do you want to…?

We’re nearly finished aren’t we? I’ll be a bit late on the other one, if we can…

Yeah, we can. How do you structure non-lecture sessions?

Labs basically for this one. There’s tutorials as well. I could structure the tutorials; I think that’s one improvement I could make, to lead them through the learning steps they need to go to and build in some self-assessment in the sense that, you know, saying, “Now you should be able to do this,” and then they’ll realise they can’t do that, you know; I think more of that would help. So that’s what I think about tutorials, that I could craft better tutorials for them I think. Instead what I end up doing is because they’re not getting what’s going over in lectures enough, at a fast enough pace, I have to back it up with kind of mini-lectures on selected bits of it, tutorials to make sure they get things. It ends up being a repetition of lecture material; no bad thing because repetition does help people to learn, so I don’t mind it too much.

Labs is quite different of course; they use lab time for training software like the Second Life thing and some other examples; they use the labs, then I let them use the time because it’s timetabled for them, they’re all supposed to be there, “No excuse, so do your coursework.” And I let them do their coursework and I will go round and help them researching, finding materials for their presentations, giving them some early feedback on whether it’s good enough quality and so on, so that’s quite an important part of their learning for the coursework. It is unfortunately only

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one topic that I hope they’ll pick up by learning what other students have done ‘cause they’ve chosen different topics for their coursework. Sadly they don’t want other people to listen in much, so they miss out that vicarious learning opportunity from other people so it doesn’t really work but…

Oh dear. You mentioned the Second Life stuff: I think that probably counts as a question back under ‘techniques and approaches’ which was…

‘Cause what you’re doing there, as I understand it, is trying a sort of immersing approach to get across an abstract concept.

Is that…?

Yep, trying to make the abstract more visible so you can actually play with the algorithm as it’s going. That I wouldn’t go so far as to call that a technique ‘cause that suggests that it works.

Right, okay.

I mean it’s really kind of innovative if you like but risky. There isn’t a lot of support in the literature or anywhere else that this thing would work; it’s just a wacky idea really to try and visualise. There’s the other tricky kind of thing at work at using ((connection power education?)) trick why… which is kind of tricky to say. I regard anything which brings people in by saying it improves their motivation as basically a trick because they should be motivated to learn the stuff anyway, and that would work for anything, you know, for AI or whatever. I mean you could use Second Life as a way to get students more involved in… you name it. So it’s kind of irrelevant to the curriculum so I wouldn’t call it a technique for that reason either. It’s a technique or… what was the other word you used?

Approach.

Approach, it’s an attempt at an approach ((laughs)) or something. I mean time will tell whether it works. They like it, they like the effort that’s been made for them.

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They feel… it’s got some positive things about it but… okay you can call it a technique if you want. I can’t really say it’s been established.

When the students do tasks in the module that you’ve set them, how much do you give them, or what do you give them and what do they produce?

In, for example, an hour long lab session or two hour?

So a particular contact time period you’re talking about?

I think so.

What do they produce? Well that will depend on… so… I mean if it’s a session in which I’ve given over to them to work on a coursework, then they’re just supposed to make some progress on the coursework, and I will go around and, not hammer anybody, but I’ll try and help people set their agendas for the next coming hour, “What are you going to do in the next hour?” Or, what is he going to do, what is she going to do, you know. So that becomes voiced and that becomes then an agenda and they have to actually get on and do it; otherwise they might fritter it or they might chat to people on Facebook or something. They might not be that blatant but they’ll be aimless, a little aimless. So that’s the less structured side of it: I just try and give them some structure. If it is something where I’ve dictated what they’re going to be doing for the whole hour, then I’ll expect them to finish what I give them in the time, yeah.

And does it change at all – you’re sort of having roughly the same sort of expectations of them…

Year on year?

…at the beginning of the module to the end of the module or…?

Oh, on their work rate?

…their marks getting… Well, not the work rate or the sophistication of their outputs or something even…

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Not sophistication of their outputs, sophistication of the material does get a bit higher towards the end. It’s meant to be kind of more… it’s probably the wrong way round from the motivation point of view: you should put the exciting stuff first. I start with philosophy and then, you know, ‘cause kind of anyone can do philosophy ((laughs)) something you can do without academic training really. It doesn’t mean you do it well… or if it’s trivial or anything, I’m not saying that, but it does make a suitable introduction. And then the boring techniques which are actually very important; they’re the more speculative hot-topics kind of stuff, comes towards the end. I wouldn’t say that’s a great… there’s patterns there; it’s not necessarily something that stand or fall by, or having set a lot of store in, it’s a useful pattern.

And you talked a bit, particularly near the beginning about sort of sweeping in the back markers…

Oh yeah.

…and enabling them to get through. What specifically do you do for them, and equally for your stars who are…?

Well the stars will automatically be interested in what you’re saying if you’re saying interesting things which are challenging and challenge their assumptions, and so there’s a lot of that stuff in AI. So they will automatically start engaging. The back markers are the ones that I… you maybe are not helping them as much as you could… alright, let’s deal with that one. Because you can… again it comes down to the coursework: because you can set… they’re going to do better in the exam anyway, they tend to take better notes in the exam, as I’ve said, but in the coursework the good ones, you can suggest other things they can put in to their coursework which you wouldn’t necessarily suggest to other students, which you think would add sparkle to it, and give you the opportunity to award them higher marks. So you can motivate them that way, and there’s no limit to how much work they could put in at the end of the day, will continually improve and they’ll get ever closer to 100% but they’ll never of course get there, it’s a sort of ((essontotic?))… but they can get pretty high. You’ve got to be serious about rewarding them well of course.

The back markers you don’t try to ‘cause it can be intimidating all this difficult stuff, it’s a different module, they’re not used to it, they’re used to people telling

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them what icon to click and so on. So when they come to me and it’s different anyway it’s a bit of a culture shift for them which leaves them feeling uprooted, unsure of their footing, so you don’t want to compound that by making the material actually pretty difficult and saying everyone should understand ((laughs)) this horrible big equation thing. You have to be understanding and sympathetic because the reality is they can’t do… some of them anyway can’t do maths, they can’t do programming so… but that doesn’t mean you can’t do AI at all; there’s quite a lot you can understand if you just package it in the right way, as popular science writers know from all over the shop. Actually you can’t do it very well in maths: I’ve never seen anyone succeed at that but in AI you can, you can get by without maths, you know, just by talking about what the equation will mean if you have to have them. So you can be softer and sympathetic on them and just keep emphasising what they need to do to pass and get them to that level where they’re fairly confident they’re going to pass, and then you can start piling on a few more marks… if you want to get to the 50s instead of the 40s then you can improve this and you can improve that. But don’t offer them the possibility of 100%, just be realistic.

So when you’re going around and you can talk to them individually, you can tune your message to the different groups and even within groups you can sense the dynamics that some are better than others so they can do this harder bit which will help the others too and they can still feel they’re making a contribution by… Okay, so you can fit it; you have to know the student eyeball to eyeball before you can really do that. In a lecture you’re talking to everyone, I just mix it up; I just try to do all of that, I try and throw in these things which are harder to understand but more interesting. And even the less intelligent students they still like that actually, but also emphasise that with the bottom line you have to be able to cross, you know, that bottom marker so they can feel secure. There isn’t a simple answer to that; it’s just not easy to do.

And how much cooperation do you allow or encourage between the students?

I love them to cooperate. I don’t want them to plagiarise and cheat and I think there is quite a clear distinction in the mind: “Now I’m cooperating with my fellow students, now I’m cheating,” and I don’t want them ever to go over that line, whether it’s misunderstood or not. And even if they’re not, I don’t want them to get into that cheating frame of mind as that’s really self-destructive. So I do let them

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and give them the opportunity to collaborate with each other and with, in this module, others as well with group work, you know, they don’t like it, they don’t like depending on other people but I like them depending on other people because it’s important for them to learn how to do that, and to realise other people have minds too and they’re not the same as yours; you’ve got to make allowances for that. In the end that’s a kind of reflection as it helps them understand their own minds.

So there are all these good reasons for teamwork. It can be abused as a way to get weak students through because you know the better students will do the work and they’ll get the credit for it; that’s what they don’t like, often they don’t like teamwork but it has so many advantages. So I do that, so I encourage cooperation amongst… so many advantages: socially has advantages, they’re interacting with other people, so it makes their social life at Uni better and that’s a very important thing to do, to help, if you can, which you can; even as a lecturer you can improve their social lives indirectly, significantly though, that’s very important. But they can’t… And they can collaborate on preparing lecture notes for the exam ‘cause that’s an American sort of idea; I like that in the American university system you have these study groups where students help each other, and that’s what gave me the idea to try that here. But they can’t help each other in the exam. ((laughs)) So that’s fine.

No. ((laughs)) That’s absolutely great Dave, and I think that’s pretty much through. Is there anything we’ve missed or that you want to add, anything I should’ve asked?

No. Should we talk about the context, what’s made a difference in the teaching… or is that coming out later? I’m not too sure on why you’re asking all the contextual kind of questions, you want to know…

I think it’s so that when… because we’re talking… we’ve got 15 or 20 people around the place, and then when we come on to the later interviews we want to be able to assess, if you like, the difference in the answers according to the context, and I can tell you there’s over… I’m interviewing three people, you’re the third, but one of the others is a Professor at St Andrews and another one is an Open University associate lecturer.

Big differences, yeah.

So huge differences in context which then affect the sorts of ways you go about teaching thereafter…

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Yes, I see.

…which is why we need this baseline data about context.

Yeah, okay. So some of the outcomes; there’s going to be some advice on how to run the university.

Well, I’m not sure it’s going to be… The main purpose of this whole project is actually about how one represents, if you like, teaching practice. I mean that’s my interest in it because of my research interest in representation and how one represents teaching practice but in order to work out how one represents it effectively, if you like, one’s got to have a pretty good grasp of what it is that one’s trying to represent.

What do you mean by represent? What is it to represent something, teaching practice or anything else? To talk about it?

To have it in some external form in which somebody else can look at it, I think is what you’re…

Without you being there? Or not necessarily…

With or without you. It’s with or without you being there, because quite often these representations actually form a, if you like, an object for discussion but it’s got to be… you’ve got to get it out of your head where it is, and into some form that somebody else can…

Right, so it’s very much like Sally Fincher’s stuff then?

Well this is…

Disciplinary Commons, yeah, which is good stuff. Yeah, I know a colleague of mine’s gone to work on one of her things.

Oh, Fiona, yes.

Yeah, to HCI, coincidentally.

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I mean I didn’t know she did that; I learned about it by other means, but that’s very good. Yeah, it’s a tremendous amount of work though in actually representing that stuff.

It is, yes.

And if you’re not clear what… why you’re doing it and what the benefit is to you or anyone else, it can probably feel a lot like a paper chase. But I know the people go there, I’m sure they feel it’s very positive because you’re learning from other people teaching the same subject, learning a lot I’m sure. And those were really valuable things, the Disciplinary Commons type things. Have to be inter- university of course because you won’t have enough people in one.

Yes. Well I think part of the whole idea is that they are inter-university so that you get these contrasting sort of transfer…

Very good.

But equally it’s… one of the queries I have in my head about it actually is whether if you like the artefact that comes out at the end of it, or the representation that comes out at the end of it is actually of any value to anybody else or whether it is the process of putting together that representation that has been the valuable thing, but…

Right. I’m sure that’s valuable too. The thing is, if you’ve got the implicit knowledge about it, if you’re an expert on something like…

You’re probably going to look at it and see… yes.

…there’s a lot… well there’s just there’s so much stuff, you can’t write it all down.

No, no quite.

And you don’t know what to write down and what to leave out, so what you write might look very different from what someone else has done but actually your experience is pretty similar. Depends a lot on who you’re talking to what you put in and people don’t talk to them… to someone there who needs to know, so you don’t say the things which you already share. It’s hard actually to abstract the…

That’s right.

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…actual things that you… that are worth saying and that you… so I don’t know what I’ve said that… yeah, most of what I’ve said hasn’t been very relevant to you probably, only some of it has.

Well, I don’t know.

I’ve just been guessing.

But this is all going off to… we’ve got someone transcribing all these interviews…

…and then the four of us who’ve been doing all the interviews are going away for a week to analyse all the data…

Very interesting.

…and compare it and see what’s coming out of it.

So if you get some kind of rubric or structured questionnaire that’s the basis of an interview focus where there are… and you have got these questions here, and then you can reduce them to those which are key, which do distinguish from different places and institutions: yeah, I can see that might be a probable thing to do. It would be nice then if that could be a form for new or starting lecturers to… because basically these are the main questions you need to address and these are your choices. You can do it early or late, depending on whatever teaching style. It could become quite useful then, yeah, but at the moment if you just… they’re so open these questions that there’s a lot that could be said, and it would just take so much effort to say it and write it all that I don’t think anyone would ever get it all down, and that’s probably why it doesn’t happen much. So you and Sally need to help people to say the most valuable stuff. And I know you don’t know what it is yet.

That’s right; we don’t know what it is yet.

But we’re hoping it will emerge ((laughs)) when we look at all this data and…

Good, well it’s a very worthwhile project from that point of view then.

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Yeah, we’ll see.

Yeah, definitely. Good. I think I see what you mean now, yeah, about representation.

That’s great. Well, thanks an awful lot for that.

Oh, it was my pleasure. Yeah, alright.

That’s great.

So we’ll have any number of interviews or questionnaires on whatever you want – you’ll let me know when?

Yes I will, yes.

Maybe Jan… I’ll be preparing that in January, so any time from then on.

Okay. Thanks a lot.