Author: Diane Baird

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

Keywords: Quality, teaching teams, technology, RMIT, Director of Teaching Quality, teaching practice, course teams, evaluation, TQM.

Article style and source: Interview. Original ultiBASE publication.

Gary Hough is Director of Teaching Quality in the Faculty of the Constructed EnvironmentRoyal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Victoria, Australia. He has a background in public welfare and teaches public sector management, strategic planning, program planning and evaluation, and social research. In 1994, RMIT began an Educational Quality Assurance (EQA) program across the University. It was a top down initiative, but was judiciously located within individual Faculties. A team approach was adopted for implementing EQA with everyone allowed (and encouraged) to play. It was a team without a captain, with players of unequal skills, and with a view of different goal posts. In this interview, Gary Hough reflects on his experience as a Director of Teaching Quality (DoTQ) working with course teams to develop and support good teaching practice.

Why was DoTQ (Director of Teaching Quality) set up within Faculties at RMIT?

To locate responsibility for quality improvement processes. Initially sort of the educational quality assurance scheme, and then implementation of the University's Teaching and Learning Strategy. The position has been resourced variously in different faculties.

It's fair to say that it was set up as a sort of parallel structure within the university, i.e. not established through the line management structure of deans and heads of departments.

So, the position within the organisation is unclear in lots of ways, and why they chose to set it up as a separate structure rather than make heads of departments responsible for EQA is a good question. A lot of them are quite antagonistic or resistant to particular notions of quality. Many of them [heads and staff] are reluctant to engage with the quality stuff for a variety of reasons.

There are some endemic problems when you start talking about quality. You've always got to be careful because there can be an unspoken assumption that you're suggesting that what people have been doing before was deficient or inadequate.

In your opinion, has EQA been successful in practice?

It's been very messy. I think it is unwise to bring in a new system and to plonk it down in a context where in many ways it's in tension with what has existed before, I think it would have been far wiser to validate people's experience of trying to do what they do well and to try to then graft what you want to do onto their traditional culture, rather than trying radically to replace it.

It must make it very awkward at times for you as an individual to implement change.

Obviously. It comes down to how you think about implementation. Certainly, to the extent that you say to people `we've got do this or that' - it's often done as simple compliance. It's counter-productive for real quality when it's done that way. I prefer to use an organisational development model with the people who are actually doing it. These are the ones who need to own it and be serious about it.

That's what you've been trying to do, to proceed in that way?

Yes, to actually talk to people: How do you want to engage with this stuff? How can you make sense of it? What are the issues for you? The other thing is, the model was predicated on the notion of course teams. In our experience, they don't even exist in many cases and where they do, they scarcely function smoothly. People are still getting their heads around what a course team might mean. It seems to me you've got to start there. The assumption was that there were these things called course teams, now let's get them to do particular things. The course teams didn't exist in many cases, so it was a mis-reading of what was going on in the first place...I would have preferred that it built on the reality of what the work was actually like. The scheme was also built on widely held assumptions that people cooperate with each other within the team and the teams compete against others. That's a facile assumption in academia where there's often conflict within teams and cooperation between and across them.

Time is a major, if unknown, factor in this type of work. It takes different people different amounts of time to change and develop. How do you measure your success?

I try to talk to course teams. In terms of what particular course teams might be about, they often have very different ideas of what it is they're doing, so failure to come together and agree in simple terms about what they're doing is not just a management failure, it's because there are very great differences in ideology and basic understandings about what it is they're doing. There is also an assumption that teams will talk to `stakeholders', industry representatives, and train people for industry. It is a mis-reading, an over-extension of the TQM logic. It's not that that stuff is beside the point, but it's just over-stating and over-simplifying the nature of what you're doing. I would rather see small, incremental real change in course teams than what seems to be large, on paper compliance, that doesn't indicate reality very well at all.

Your work in evaluation has been recognised by the Australasian Evaluation Society by an award for a paper you co-authored with Patricia Rogers. What was it about?

The paper [Improving the effectiveness of evaluations: Making the link to organisational theory] won the Caulley-Tulloch Pioneering Literature Award in Evaluation. It was about linking theories of evaluation and theories of organisation. It explored the central proposition that when people start talking about evaluation and evaluating organisational activities, they hardly ever explicate how they think/assume their organisations run. We've described some models of policy implementation and how each assume that actions get implemented in the organisation; then what that means for evaluation.

How do you think people should frame the use of technology in education?

Technology, as I define it, is the actual nature of the work process; how work is organised. We've always framed work around particular notions of technology. Arguments that the use of machines and technology always involves programming of responses, and the de-skilling of workers, are too simplistic. The crucial question is the way in which technology is enlisted and used. At the present time, many people seem to be drawn to less imaginative and more programmed approaches to organising work. So, for managers who think that way, technological solutions are attractive because they can promise to program out uncertainty, and to make activities transparent and replicable. Of course, information technology, or any other form of technology, doesn't necessarily have to be used in that way.

In terms of the teaching and learning strategy, we're asked to do major planning documents each year. Rather than write some abstract planning document, we're describing a series of projects about what we think is most important. No one course of action will necessarily lead to innovation or necessarily lead to any saving of resources. We're going to run three or four major projects in our faculty next year to explore ways to do that. All this stuff about teaching and learning, student focus, graduate attributes; many people see it as checklists and behavioural outcomes...What we want to do is try and embody those in how we go about doing it in the first place. People haven't begun to think that through at all, I don't think. That's where we want to start.

There are always lots of routes to good practice. I don't think lectures to large groups and tutorials is always a good way to teach. The worst version of the information technology stuff is that it replicates the problems with lectures. You stick a TV screen in front of 400 people and standardise the experience. If that's the future, I think we do away with lectures; they're going to be even less useful once that happens.

How should academics be approaching the use of technology in teaching/learning?

What you can do is to develop creative modules which students can engage with and which teachers can use. If you can develop those, then you can build many courses around them.

Do you see a way of helping academics work more cooperatively in developing these modules?

That's the other dumb thing, if you like. The competition stuff is just endemic in the world now. Many people are competing to get funding for `big' teaching solutions. There are smaller solutions. Another of the things we want to get going in our faculty next year is using email for discussion groups and post-graduate supervision. These are an example of low tech solutions, or low cost solutions. It's quite possible to give some forms of supervision of particular students, using email and setting up chat groups amongst the students and things like that. Our role is to help staff develop practical, incremental improvements and innovations.

Each case is different, but how do you know when to pull out and turn everything over to them?

I don't think you need everybody involved in everything. It's a real trick to make sure people are involved in the level they want to be. The other age-old thing we know is that people are frequently consulted about things they don't want to be consulted about and are not consulted about the things that they do. They are not involved in the serious decision-making, then they are completely responsible for all the implementation. There's fifty years of literature which will tell you that programs actually get planned when they are implemented by the implementors. I know that's a bias that I have, but it has been validated in my own experience and work history.

I'm sitting between the planning stuff and the actual reality of the workers, so I've got very clear biases and practice experience in bringing those worlds together. I come at it from the stand-point of how do you actually implement programs. I don't assume organisations have common goals or common purposes; I don't think you need to, in order for them to run well.

How would you define quality in teaching/learning?

Organisations that systematically evaluate what they're doing, but against a set of values, that's my idea of what an organisation is. At the moment you have some that are disconnected, contextless, without boundaries; strategic planning at one end, and the TQM stuff is meant to keep the production process going at the other. I think they are both very second-rate ways of thinking about what organisations can do. We need to ask: `Is what we are doing good and worthwhile, and in whose eyes, and for what reasons?'

The quality discourse is not a coherent body of theory; it's an eclectic collection of things that work and some things that shouldn't sit together particularly well. The versions of it which are about no variation, or very little variation, comes from the Japanese car industry. Its logic is production engineering. All that listening to stakeholders, I mean, that's facile. Stakeholders are not the same. Some stakeholders have immense power doing nothing. Other stakeholders, no matter how much they yell and scream, get a very small stake. The term comes from the gold rush, stakeholders; it's about claims. We shouldn't assume that you can easily reconcile the interests of stake holders.

I really don't like the language of the customer either. I mean, in the social work department, we've always sought feedback from students: written feedback, built into the planning. We were doing this in the early eighties...when it had nothing to do with notions of customers. It had to do with a respect for service users, a totally different route. A lot of this [customer focus] stuff is a language of bad faith.

Even the assumption that the motivation for people who work in the public sector is the same as the people who work in the private sector. I don't think the motivation is the same. Again, it's not that that way of understanding the world is completely wrong, but it's just that to collapse all our social interactions within that is plain silly.

Have your ideas about these issues changed over the years?

No, they don't fundamentally change. I think we are living in a dumb period where there's a lot of dumb activity. I mean, organisations are increasingly unkind places. People are asked to do dumb and dishonourable work. I think it is important that you create oases of good practice, because that is important to do, for yourself as well as for everyone else. There are some ethical principles behind how you act.

I try to say to course teams, `Do you want to treat students well? Do you want to have certain assumptions around their control over things that are important to them?' There is a whole series of things that they really want to do. They don't want to do it because of compliance with a formally sanctioned strategy. I want to actually get the dialogue going about which bits of this people want to do. In fact, paradoxically, a lot of good practice is being discouraged by the system at the moment because a lot of them are losing respect for the actual activities because of the way in which they are being framed and commodified.

Who are some of the people who have influenced you most in the way you think about education?

I don't know...It was mainly my experiences in schools, at universities. I remember getting annoyed with that sort of behaviourist stuff in psychology, thinking `I don't like this.' When I was doing teacher training we were required to write programs with formal behavioural learning outcomes. You know, Bloom's taxonomy of educational outcomes and all. I knew what was wrong with that stuff then.

I think we actually do far better having a genuine multi-culture within organisations. But at the moment we're getting this massive mono-culture within organisations and between them, and that's what's wrong. I actually think you need different understandings for different areas, and you need different ways of going about things. That's precisely what's under attack at the moment. I think we have this dominating mono-culture.

[Other] experiences have given me a mistrust of the mainstream which I've never lost. That formed a lot of ideas about treating people with respect and not imposing things on people.

What do you think are some of the greatest challenges facing universities over the next five years?

The university is an abstraction. I don't like big, united organisations; I think that's unhealthy. You would like to think that universities were places where fundamental problems about how we live and how we should live are thought about, debated, and learnt about. They should not be seen purely as productive or competitive enterprises. They can't act as if they are an entity which only makes decisions in terms of the growth or health of the entity. There are larger issues. I also think that the introduction of business culture on universities means that generally they are run in dumber ways, with lower standards. What's always been true is that universities have got pockets of really good practice and pockets of bad practice in different areas and at different times.

So what's going to make them smarter?

Well, at the moment, you're going to get this horrible grey homogenisation. The managerial sort of control of universities is dragging many down, as well as dragging the bottom up. But the university is an abstraction. There is too much division of policy and practice. We are too turned inward now. There is much less cooperative activity; we are concentrated on reduction in resources, reductions in staff, competition with other universities. When all this is happening, it is the worst time to engage with the quality stuff. But there is still the challenge to operate honourably and efficiently. You've still got to, in a day-to-day way, run things that are pretty decent. You've got to do that for yourself anyway, or you couldn't keep doing it.

Does it come down to a personal definition of decency?

No, no. You have to have communities. You are constantly building communities of people and that's not through claiming what you do; it's through acting it out. You've actually got to treat people well. That comes to things like maintaining standards. At the moment there's a pressure to pass everyone because you are judged on your `through-put'. People know if what they've done is no good or it's second-rate. So it's for them that you maintain [standards] so that they have their own respect for what they're doing.

Interview recorded on 26 November 1996.

The award-winning article mentioned in the interview is printed in Evaluation and Program Planning, Vol. 18, No. 4, pp.321-332, 1995.

About the author

Dr Diane Baird
Research Officer/Editor
ultiBASE
RMIT
Email: mailto:diane@rmit.edu.au