CUTSD Staff Development Proposal 1999

‘Communication Skills Project’

CUTSD Staff Development Proposal 1999

Project Summary:

The Communication Skills Project represents a collaboration of staff at 10 universities working to enhance students’ professional communication skills by employing flexible delivery for staff development. Our project team proposes three, integrated thrusts, to:

• Form networks of ‘early-adopter’ lecturers in a range of disciplines to test and provide reviews of materials and teaching strategies to enhance students’ professional communication skills;
• Modularise these communication skill materials and teaching strategies into ready-to-use formats, tailored for specific disciplines and accompanied by reviews by lecturers in those disciplines (as mentioned above); and
• Establish on the web a database, to contain these materials and strategies, that is publicised via hot-links in broadcast e-mail messages and icons on lecturers’ computer screens.

The proposed project will begin with professional communication skills necessary in groupwork and teamwork for lecturers in Commerce and Business and then expand into other communication skill areas and other disciplines. The project integrates the collaborators’ efforts on previous and current university-funded and CUTSD-funded projects in related areas. Our approach of lecturer networks and flexible delivery could be used as a model for aiding lecturers in taking a developmental approach to imbuing students with other ‘graduate attributes’.

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1. Project Context and Rationale

The proposed staff development project aims to enhance graduate attributes in the area of professional communication skills in the ten collaborating universities. The project’s ultimate goal is to address five, broad skill areas employed across all disciplines: (1) presentation skills; (2) facilitating teamwork, meetings, and consultations; (3) producing professional documents; (4) handling media interviews and addressing the public; and (5) producing videos, web sites, and other multimedia products.[1] We will begin with a narrow focus in Commerce and Business in communication skill area (2), groupwork and teamwork. Materials and teaching strategies tailored to each discipline within Commerce and Business will be mounted on a web site in a modular format, such as that illustrated in Appendix 3. Use of the web site will be promoted by both organisational and technological strategies:

• formation of networks of ‘early adopter’ lecturers;
• attaching reviews by these lecturers to all mounted materials (a strategy recognised to boost adoption);
• broadcast e-mail with hot-links to the web site; and
• icons on lecturers’ computer screens linked to the web site.

The project goals, and the proposed approach to achieve them, are grounded in growing attention to graduate attributes, increased experience with flexible delivery, and recognition of the effectiveness of mutual support among lecturers in their teaching development.

Communication skills are ubiquitous in lists of university graduate attributes. CurtinUniversity’s Communication-in-Context policy, for example, promotes, ‘the development of programs and practices which aim to provide all graduates with: a high degree of oral, writing, graphical, interpersonal and negotiating skills.’ In business, the Karpin Report (1995) calls for postgraduate and undergraduate curricula to provide greater emphasis on communications and team building, concluding that managers need improved ‘people skills’. Concern has been expressed that existing undergraduate programs are not producing graduates with the kinds of professional skills (Australia. NBEET, 1992; Australian Association of Graduate Employers, 1993; Business/Higher Education Round Table, 1992; Harvey, 1993a, 1993b; Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia, 1994; The Association of Graduate Recruiters, 1995) and lifelong learning skills (Candy & Crebert, 1991; Candy, Crebert, & O’Leary, 1994) that they need in order to be successful in their professions. Furthermore, if they are to become ‘reflective practitioners’, students must gain insight into how communication strategies affect the construction of their professional identities and those of professionals in other fields (Schoen, 1987; Rifkin with Martin, 1997).

Three years ago, a group of lecturers in the Learning and Teaching Research Group at the University of Wollongong recognised that they all taught communication albeit in different faculties and that they could benefit from sharing materials and insights. They identified five areas of professional communication skills (listed above) common to their disciplines and determined that communication skills are enhanced most when addressed in a developmental fashion[2] in both communication and non-communication subjects. The group established the seed of the Communication Skills Project and received $40,000 from the Pro Vice-Chancellor (Academic) to develop pilot modular materials, evaluate their transferability and effectiveness, find a way to make them available to academics via a web site, seek collaboration with complementary efforts at other universities, and do an audit of all subject outlines on campus as a needs assessment.

The audit of subject outlines at the University of Wollongong indicates that groupwork, for example, is assessed in only 8% of 676 subjects across all faculties.[3] It is assessed in only 2% of 209 subjects in Engineering, Science, and Informatics, 3% of subjects in the Arts and Creative Arts, and 16% in the professions, Law, Commerce, Education, and Health and Behavioural Sciences. Formal presentations and oral participation in class are assessed in 48% of subjects. These results resonate with findings from twenty, in-depth interviews of lecturers at the University of Wollongong identified as ‘innovative’.[4] Even these lecturers rarely open a communication textbook, select a video on presentation skills, or compose a set of guidelines for their students on facilitating a group project. Though lecturers are familiar with taking a developmental approach to building students’ disciplinary knowledge, their practices indicate less familiarity with embedding this approach to teaching communication skills in a curriculum.

Extensive searches and consultations over the last two years reveal that there exists no database such as the one proposed. However, case studies of use of particular teaching strategies to enhance communication skills do exist[5], commercially produced videotapes are available, and communication lecturers each have their own cache of relevant activity plans, handouts, and assignment guidelines. Dissemination of such materials remains problematic among communication lecturers and particularly to non-communication lecturers.

Efforts to develop lecturers’ abilities to enhance students’ professional skills, communication skills, and graduate attributes have been under way at our collaborating universities. CurtinUniversityBusinessSchool received a $100,000 internal grant to boost students’ professional skills. University of Queensland’s new Ipswich campus is a pilot site for similar work, which will develop approaches to be transferred back to the main, St. Lucia campus. University of New England has a CUTSD-funded project to document how lecturers from a range of disciplines incorporate materials to enhance graduate attributes (Muldoon, 1998). Flinders University and University of Adelaide seek to extend previous CAUT/CUTSD-funded work on use of flexible delivery for staff development in this area, with both recently launching interactive web sites for staff development. RMIT is currently producing communication skills materials for all entering students, both Higher Education and TAFE students, and for sale to industry.[6]

The desire now is to combine complementary aspects of these efforts with a three-part thrust to facilitate staff development by fostering incorporation by lecturers in a developmental way of professional communication skill materials and teaching strategies. The three thrusts are, as noted in the Project Summary:

1. Forging of networks among ‘early adopter’ lecturers and staff development officers within universities and across universities within disciplines;
2. Modularisation and tailoring of teaching and learning materials for specific disciplines; and
3. Developing the technological, flexibledelivery mechanism using a web site, broadcast e-mail, and icons on lecturers’ computer screens.

These three thrusts have been broken down into subtasks to be completed during the project period, which are laid out in this proposal in Section 10 Project Timeframe. These subtasks, some of which have begun already, range from establishing formats for modularising useful materials in ways tailored for specific disciplines to developing strategies for garnering lecturer adoption, adaptation, and feedback on these materials.

We intend to incorporate existing multi-media materials -- such as those produced for entering students by RMIT, for presentation skills by QUT, and for generic skills for third-year students in Anatomy and Human Biology at UWA -- as well as new materials as they become available. Costs of producing such high-end materials will be left to universities and commercial concerns. We will focus on evaluating what is available in multi-media and print and adapt it for specific disciplines.[7] We will work to obtain university and industry support, in terms of dollars and/or recognition, for lecturers willing to develop such materials, or simpler print materials, for our distribution mechanism. The hope is that lecturers may also earn DETYA research ‘points’ for refereed web contributions of modularised, print and multi-media materials.

We intend to make our efforts compatable with other efforts in the areas of basic composition skills and other generic skills and tertiary literacies. We will be developing organisational and technological mechanisms that can be used to foster adoption of these materials and their developmental incorporation into curricula by lecturers.

We are preparing materials for flexible delivery to lecturers with a potential future facility for delivery directly to students. Our web site will provide links steering lecturers to web-based materials accessible to students. A useful spin off in the future would be a Communication Skills site specifically for students.

The project will progress to cover a range of professional communication skills and disciplines outside Commerce and Business as time and funding permit. As part of their efforts for the proposed project, the Flinders University team, for example, wish to extend materials for use in their Bachelor of Arts program, a program where no single profession sets the standards or formats for professional communication. The collaborator at UWA wishes to continue his work in Anatomy and Human Biology. QUT has well-developed materials in presentation skills.

2. Literature and/or Current Practice Relating to Proposal

Examples of literature and practice are cited below in relation to key aspects of the proposed project.

Policies to get lecturers to incorporate materials on professional communication skillsinto the curriculum have been established at the collaborating universities. In the Department of Commerce at the University of Adelaide, for example, lecturers must nominate which communication skills they will address when doing course and subject planning. However, there is little staff development offered on how students might best learn these skills. Curtin Business School’s Professional Skills Project aims to enhance the professional skills and employability of its graduates by embedding key professional skills identified by employers into the 23 majors of their B.Com program.

Why tailor communication skills materials to each discipline? Research at the University of Adelaide and elsewhere suggests that such generic skills are best learned in the context of a discipline (Hattie, Biggs, & Purdie, 1996; Hadwin & Winne, 1996) and that staff development enhances such learning (Ingleton and Wake, 1997). Thus, groupwork in the management profession will differ, and needs to be learned differently, from group research in a chemistry laboratory. Initial adaptation to context in our project is via tailoring of materials and teaching strategies to each discipline. Further adaptation occurs when the lecturer modifies these materials and strategies for her class. This opportunity to modify should make materials more attractive and enhance lecturer adoption. Adoption often requires external assistance, though, from staff development officers and/or other lecturers. At the University of Wollongong, development of lecturers’ ability to teach generic skills currently includes half-day workshops as well as guest lectures in the target lecturer’s class and individual coaching of lecturers by Learning Development staff (Ewan, 1998). The small numbers of lecturers receiving individual assistance express enthusiasm, but resources to support such efforts are stretched.

Such economic forces and technological opportunities are fueling pushes toward flexible delivery (Daniel, 1997; Georghagen, 1998). Flexible delivery to lecturers for staff development has been tested by the University of Adelaide and Flinders University.[8] Each is experimenting with its own interactive course for staff on the web, the University of Adelaide using TopClass and Flinders using WebCT, as alternatives to face-to-face courses for introducing new staff to university teaching. Flinders is also producing an interactive tutorial on assessment for lecturer use. Such web-based delivery enables lecturers to experience how web-based resources might be used in their own teaching (Laurillard, 1993).

The web also plays a role in the networks of lecturers that already exist within disciplines between universities, particularly in regard to research but also in regard to teaching.[9] Such networks are supported by conferences and journals, but materials and outlines of teaching strategies presented are usually not in a format ready for use. Networks across disciplines but within one university for the purpose of enhancing teaching tend to be more tenuous and in need of support. The University of Wollongong has its Learning and Teaching Research Group, which draws forty-some innovative lecturers from a wide range of disciplines as well as educational researchers. However, the sharing of teaching materials within the group tends to be only via informal chatting at meetings and at monthly seminars that focus on one lecturer’s method.

How do you get lecturers to adopt new materials not in their discipline? Start small, and begin with the ‘right’ people. Lecturers, or members of any population, can be categorised according to their willingness to adopt new ideas, ideas from outside their traditional ‘community of practice’. Among these categories – (a) innovators, (b) early adopters, (c) early majority, (d) late majority, and (e) laggards (see chart below; Rogers, 1995) -- our initial target group are the 10% of lecturers who could be classified as ‘early adopters’. An early adopter is the type of lecturer who shows up repeatedly for staff development activities and might mix there with lecturers from other disciplines. Studies show (Rogers, 1995) that once early adopters adopt and demonstrate effectiveness, some become ‘change agents’ and stir the ‘early majority’ to follow. We recently did a proof-of-principle test where we e-mailed teaching tips on groupwork to all 105 Commerce lecturers at the University of Wollongong. Within one working day, 10% responded indicating that they found the tip useful. University-wide, that would be the equivalent of one entire faculty. The test suggests that a certain fraction of lecturers in Accountancy, Economics, Business Systems, and Marketing are willing to consider using communication skills materials originally developed in Management.

A B C D E

How would you get lecturers to take time to contribute to the web site, either adding materials and teaching strategies or adding reviews of existing materials? One incentive for lecturers to contribute to the web site would be if such contributions could count as ‘publications’ either for DETYA ‘points’ or merely for internal evaluation for promotion and tenure. We would push for policies to acknowledge such contributions in each university’s promotion and tenure processes or in other forms of institutional support. Another strategy for gathering materials and teaching strategies has been pilot tested by a team at the University of Wollongong during the last six months. Postgraduate research assistants acted as ‘reporters’, interviewing twenty innovative lecturers in depth (1-2 hours) to characterise their innovative assessment practices. The interview scheme is set to be trialed on a larger scale this session with interviews of 140 lecturers to be conducted by teams of third-year, undergraduate students in Education as part of their study of research methods. This effort parallels the work of one team member, Muldoon, who is interviewing exemplary lecturers at UNE to garner insights into how they incorporate graduate attributes/generic skills strategies into their teaching (a CUTSD Individual project). The proposed project incorporates a budget item to support hiring such ‘reporters’ to interview lecturers for materials, strategies, and commentary to add to the database, where the interviews can be done in person or by phone.

How will a collaborative effort among ten universities work? We are seeking to employ strategies proven successful in existing consortia among Australian universities. See Appendix 1.

3. Linkage to Institutional Plans and Priorities

The Communication Skills Project aligns with plans and priorities of the collaborating universities in areas of staff development and student learning. The University of Wollongong Strategic Plan(1997), for example, addresses as a priority provision of an environment with opportunities for staff for professional development. It also delineates desired attributes of a Wollongong graduate, a list where communication skills are prominent (Office of the Vice Chancellor, 1997: p.5). The University appointed a Tertiary Literacies Coordinator in 1996, and the Tertiary Literacies Committee has been operating since 1994.

Each of the collaborating universities gives this project’s focus a similarly high priority, as exemplified by their efforts mentioned in Section 1 of this proposal. CurtinBusinessSchool has its $100,000 project for communication skills, which supports the University’s Communication-in-Context Policy and its Teaching and Learning Plan objectives. RMIT has a strategic investment project to develop communication skills materials for all first-year students. QUT put $100,000 into a presentation skills CD-ROM and has communication as a foundation subject in its popular, business major. UNE lists Attributes of a UNE Graduate and provides institutional support for its CUTSD project studying best practice by lecturers in this area. The University of Queensland is investing significantly in communication skills development practices and materials at its satellite campus in Ipswich, which is serving as a pilot for programs to be instituted on its main campus. Web-based staff training is being undertaken at FlindersUniversity and the University of Adelaide. This project, then, provides a nexus for existing plans and priorities and ongoing efforts to address thoses priorities.