PeterSmith: Portfolio

On-line journals (web logs or 'blogs') have become a popular way for people to express their opinion on issues, and as a way to share their reflections. As part of my teaching I have encouraged students to share their work and their reflections through a web-site I run called The Reflective Practitioner. Based on an idea from Dartmouth (DartBlogs), which in turn was based on an idea from Harvard weblogs, this web-site allows students to keep an on-line journal. The evidence from the web-site's logs and from student feedback is that the journals are a very popular way for students to understand one another better. Although many students are too shy to comit themselves to "paper" as it were, some students have continued their journals even after leaving the class and the university (much in the same way as the Harvard weblogs are available to alumni as well as their current students).

Although not widely used in Faculty of Business & Economics, the use of case teaching is prevalent at many business schools. I have adopted case teaching with both my undergraduate and MBA classes. This takes the form of guided analysis and discussion with marks being awarded for student participation. I have successfully used this form of teaching with classes ranging from 12 to 100 students. As can be seen from student feedback, once they understand the purpose and have had some practice in the method, they find it an enjoyable and reward method.

For over five years, I have been using the business simulation Mike's Bikes, both with first year students and with stage III students. The simulation is used as a practice field for students to experience being part of a multi-disciplinary management team. The simulation is a core part of the course, rather than being an adjunct to it. Thus, all the learning and teaching is centred on the simulation and the problems that the students encounter in managing their own team and their own company.

I have started to share my teaching philosophy, as demonstrated by this journal, my research work, and my reflections on teaching with my students through the use of on-line journals or blogs.

Having used Cecil for a number of years to advise students of their grades I was interested in going one step further and mark their work online. Fortunately, Turn It In also allows for the electronic marking of students' work. I have trialled this system with my students, and whilst they liked the immediacy and detail of the feedback process, there are some infrastructural problems that prevent me from adopting this – specifically, we are too far away from the servers in the USA and so the response is insufficient for it to be practical.

One of the facilities available through using Turn It In is peer feedback. Once students have submitted their work to Turn It In, it is possible to set up rubrics that allow students to review and critique the work of their peers. I have used this for a number of years in the course MGMT 302 - Business Policy & Strategy and it is widely liked.

Having attended a seminar in Melbourne on plagiarism I was luckily enough to meet with John Barry, the founder and CEO of iParadigms. One of the products that iParadigms produces is Turn It In, a tool that checks the originality of students' work. Since then I have be actively promoting the use of similar products and routinely use Turn It In in all my classes. Besides running teaching seminars on the subject I have provided advice to the university's Quality Office. I have also provided advice and support to a number of departments outside of Business & Economics, e.g. Theology, Engineering, and Philosophy

In the BBIM, as part of the core management papers, an Information Literacy programme was put in place with Lynne Mitchell of the library. Besides being delivered in-person and on-line by library staff, this collaboration entailed customising a program of learning so that it directly related to the management material being taught and was explicitly linked to subsequent assessments.

I led the development of the Academic Honesty Assistance tutorial, also known as AHA with Lisa Callagher and Lynne Mitchell. This tutorial provides about four to six hours of instruction and assessment on Academic Honesty.

Many tutorials on plagiarism focus on what 'must' be done, and the penalties for non-compliance. This tutorial is different, because it develops an understanding of knowledge building culture of the University and so it focuses on 'why' it is necessary to be academically honest. The tutorial then provides tools and strategies to assist the student with that goal.

The tutorial has been tested with a large stage I class (900+ students), and has been found to have a positive impact on increasing the level of academic honesty, and thus reducing the level of activities such as plagiarism.

The development of AHA was funded by a $10,000 Teaching Improvement Grant. Currently, other departments and faculties are looking at adopting AHA.

Traditionally, evaluation of staff by students has been done using “pen & paper” through CPD. In the second semester of 2004 I trialled the new on-line system provided in conjunction with CPD and Cecil.

This system allowed quicker feedback from students about their concerns, and thus I was able to make adjustments in my teaching to address those concerns. Prior to using this system, time delays meant that adjustments could only be made for subsequent classes and not the current class.

In 2003, as part of MGMT 301 - Management Theory & Practice, we (the teaching team) wanted to have an experiential exercise for the students based on 'virtuality'.

It was decided the classic 'Dollar Auction' exercise would be moved into the virtual world. And so, I wrote a small web application that would allow the 'Dollar Auction' to take place in real-time and on-line. Subsequently, we used the exercise with a class of about 80 students. The experience was quiet different to the face-to-face version, and provided rich experiences that we were able to successfully debrief.

Since then, we have also used the exercise as part of a short course in Virutality.

For MGMT 302 - Business Policy & Strategy, students are assessed each week using a bank of multiple choice questions. These questions are delivered to students in-class using Cecil.

Having written over 600 questions there is, nevertheless, the lingering question, "Do they work?".

This is where I have adopted TestGraf to carry out statistical analysis of the questions. This analysis allows me to diagnose problems with whole tests, individual questions, and items with a question. Consequently, I have strong evidence of the quality, in terms of discrimination and validity, of questionnaires I have written.

My use of TestGraf has been so successful, that Cecil have incorporated TestGraf's main functionality into Cecil's test engine.