I was invited by Deakin University (Faculty of Health) to help create and deliver a new course in Fundamentals of Health Informatics (since rebranded as "Fundamentals of Digital Health"). Deakin is an Australian University and the unit was pitched as a core unit of both a Masters in Health Sciences and MBA in Healthcare course and generally had about 30 to 50 adult students attending in a mix of in class and online. Many of the students were recruited from overseas, particularly India, Philippines, Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Denmark and a core cohort from Australia.
My part-time teaching role ceased in 2024 when the courses were internally restructured. My role with the Deakin University now continues in a sessional research capacity with the Institute for Health Transformation (experts.deakin.edu.au/50054-paul-cooper).
This has given me time to reflect on what I learned from my time as a late career educator and I thought I'd share some of my insights.
Lesson 1 - Overseas Students Can Be Very Shy
My first insight into the dynamics of the culturally-mixed adult classroom came when my colleague Dr. Imran Muhammad and I started to give our second lesson in a campus classroom that was temporarily located near the cafe. At the end of the first hour, we stopped for a quick break and a small smattering of students remained in the classroom. To eliminate the cafe noise we shut the door and chatted away for a bit waiting for the students to return. But the students failed to return from the break, and somewhat mystified (and a bit despondent) at the lack of engagement, my colleague and I decided to continue the lesson with the few remaining students. However, after quite a while we heard a tentative knocking - and on opening the door found a large group of shy students outside - the door had been accidentally locked by us, and they were simply waiting for us to let them in!
That shyness of the overseas student group was something I would frequently find and needed to work hard to overcome. I eventually started using Mentimeter as a tool to help break down social barriers by allowing students to interact with me in the class via their devices until they grew confident enough (usually week 3) to simply speak up.
What I found more generally about attendance was that many of my students needed to work part-time to support their education so all of them being present in the class at any one time was an on-going challenge. I learned not to take it personally if a full classroom did not eventuate every time. This was not compulsory school attendance after all.
Lesson 2 - Privacy Is Not a Universal Value
Again during my first year of teaching I was asked to give some feedback to a female student about her assignment. It was my first time at this, so I sought advice from my mentor at the University and arranged a safe space for her to come and speak with me - glass door and people visible around. But she turned up with another male student and they both came into the room.
I figured perhaps the male student was a boyfriend and he was there for cultural support. On my inquiry she said “no - Sarjit (name changed) is here for feedback too”. I was perplexed. My feedback was about her work, so I repeated this to them. They both smiled and nodded and stayed seating. Finally I said, "look, one of you has to leave for me to give the private feedback". They exchanged looks and hurriedly talked to each other in Hindi. Sarjit then stood up, smiled at me and left. Ursa (not her real name) then laughed and said “oh sir - in our culture all PRIVATE feedback is given in a GROUP session. The professor says to each of us in turn, ‘well you did this well or badly’ and onto the next so we all listen in’”. I was stunned. We had our session, and then, I asked her what she thought about this process. She said “amazing - I have never had a one on one session with a professor before”. In the end, I modified my style to give SOME feedback in a GROUP and private feedback where some remediable attention was really needed.
But my assumptions of privacy continued to be challenged particularly by my subcontinent students: the following year when in response to my question “what’s the first thing you do when a person presents at a clinic with an unusual condition?” a student said “well we send out an all staff email for everyone to come and see the unusual patient”! Holy cow - I learned a LOT about the norms of patient privacy in different cultures that day.
Sometimes students sent me WAY too much personal and private information in their attempts to explain why they were delayed in sending in an assessment. Goodness. I had to learn to state clearly in class that I only needed a medical certificate - I didn't need the full private story.
My bigger learning is that assumptions about privacy and confidentiality being universally understood cannot be made - I needed to be totally explicit and explain reasoning to every group of students.
Lesson 3 - There Are Always Outliers
In each class I would usually have one student who was head and shoulder above the rest - it was wonderful but also a challenge at the same time, because they clearly wanted to proceed at depth and pace beyond the rest of the class. I found that the material needed to have some flexibility to offer depth to the highly engaged student, while being able to operate at a pace suitable for the majority. In these days of emerging personalized AI-assisted teaching that will become easier. But it’s something to definitely expect in each class.
My mentor Sandeep Reddy informed me recently of the term “#heutology” (self-determined learning that places the learner in complete control of their educational journey, setting their own goals, managing their pace, and choosing resources), where the task of the educator of a unit is to provide a range of learning modalities and material that the student can “mix and match”. In my case I produced audio podcasts, video guides and material of various depth for each week which eventually proved to be a good way to service the needs of the different learning styles and paces.
I also discovered that some cultures emphasised rote learning at school where the answers are typically to be found in the material presented. My open ended style of questioning totally flummoxed such students, and I learned that I needed to offer some more tightly bounded defined case study material suitable for more constrained Q&A in the first weeks to help them get a grounding. Then the student could progress to more open ended material where I could ask questions expected to be researched by the student (i.e. answers not found in the case study). This is a learning approach called scaffolded learning and I found it works well. Since life is open ended, I think this style of questioning is appropriate, and even though it remained challenging for some students, I believe it was more useful to their ultimate career aspirations.
Lesson 4 - Empathy Is Needed
Everybody has life complications. I also learned that every student has life complications, and while the assessment must be fair to all, it was necessary to be mindful of mental health, family and health situations of individuals. Some student stories were heartbreaking. One of the most difficult situations I encountered was with a student of average talent, who told me she was only in the class because her village had banded together to support her financially and she felt obligated. She was depressed about her lack of progression (not just in my unit) and after failing outright, took the class again the next year only to drop out completely. I tried my best with mental health services to support her, but I think it did not resolve happily.
My counsel to any student, or for anyone in a career arc is to do the work ONLY if you are determined that it is YOUR pathway. Don’t undertake any heavy study for family reasons or because you are “guilted into it”, however well-meaning that might be.
Lesson 5 - You Need to Know Your Stuff
To be confident enough to teach “off script” and without hesitation, you need to know a lot more of the domain than you teach and to have at least some hands-on knowledge of it. This is pretty obvious, but I’m sure we all know of some teachers who were only a “page ahead” of the students, so to speak, and that means their teaching will be brittle. As soon as a student query goes slightly “off script” they would be lost. So there’s nothing for it but to be way ahead on the topic depth. A dedication to lifelong learning is truly vital.
For me, my style was also to tap into the depth of experience from students in the classroom as well as my own and I adopted a style of educating that engaged the students to bring their lived experience to the classroom. It made the lessons very real and practical for us all, but it meant each class was unique in that sense so hard to reproduce exactly for the next trimester. That's the way open-ended teaching works, and each teacher must come to their own view about what style works best for them. For me a facilitative, consultative style aligned with my career experience where I saw the students more as "clients" to be assisted in their learning journey rather than to be directly "taught" and so this approach was the most natural for me to start with. But each style can be improved. See lesson 8 about the importance feedback!
Lesson 6 - Don't Make Simplistic Assumptions About Cultures
I had one very culturally shy student from Kuwait who would not initially sit with other students and also would not speak up. After using Mentimeter for three weeks she finally sat with the other female students in class and when she felt brave enough in the 4th week she put her hand up and in the course of her response to a question revealed she had been the implementation lead for one of the world’s most advanced digital health hospitals in Kuwait. We all learned a lot from her direct experience. Another shy student from Nigeria had fantastic knowledge of using digital systems in remote communities. And one indigenous student dialing in remotely from far north of Darwin taught us all a lot about what worked and didn’t, in his local community. I found there’s great experience that students bring from places other than the highly advanced typical European or US environments.
Lesson 7 - Assessing Students Is Hard
Initially I struggled with how to assess students fairly. I would churn with anxiety with every assessment task. With help from wonderful highly experienced educator colleagues (shout out to Susie Macfarlane and Sandeep Reddy in particular) I found that the work put into designing sound rubrics for assessing work made the process much less stressful. In recent years, I believe AI is making it easier to create good rubrics, but it’s WAY harder than you might imagine to come up with assessing systems that are consistent and fair and transparent. Deakin has great support for educators and the world-known CRADLE (Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning) team deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/why- deakin/education-excellence/cradle leads the way in researching what works and doesn’t in terms of education. Being encouraged to enroll in the Fellowship of Higher Education really helped push me into more reflective educating and I can’t thank the team at HEA Deakin enough deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/why-deakin/education- excellence/deakinhe-fellowship.
Lesson 8 - Feedback Needs to Be Honest
I found that giving feedback worked best when it was personalised to the maximum extent possible - when I could say that I really had a handle on the student and how they worked. And so I could tailor the feedback. I trialled using Audio and Video feedback but the students told me that it didn’t work any better than my straight text feedback - I guess they could read my personality in the text anyway.
I worked hard to make my teaching engaging to the students, and I sought feedback to how I was doing regularly throughout the duration of the unit. At the end of the unit there was formal feedback from a survey but it took ages for it to be processed by the University (something I definitely thought could be made more rapid) and did not arrive in a timely manner. Instead I relied more on the anonymous features of the Menti system for on-the-fly feedback and it worked very well for gaining direct insight from the students as to depth of some material, the pace, and also style on occasion.
On a personal note I received some feedback on my own submission to an external mentor as part of my higher education accreditation and it came back with red circles, exclamations and underlines all over it. THAT feedback certainly did NOT work for me. It provoked flashbacks to school history essays. So I am personally very careful to engage in positive constructive feedback (not with red pen) and I think this remains true for all adult learning. So be kind - but honest was my learning.
Lesson 9 - Engage Your Class with Industry and Government Guests
In each unit I taught I would usually have three or four external colleagues coming along to present or discuss a topic and the feedback from students was very positive about tapping into their industry or government knowledge. I thank all those who gave up some time for this, and hope they also got something out of it. These colleagues were also a great help in assisting the students in their career aspirations, something I was keen to help them with. To me, their time spent in my unit was intended to be useful to their career pathway and the feedback I received was very positive with respect to the external guests.
My Deakin colleague Lemai Nguyen ran a panel session with guests in her final class, and I thought that was amazingly creative, so in my last few classes I adopted that approach which created excellent engagement with the students. I'm still learning how to make classes more engaging and I thank colleagues like Lemai and at CRADLE for pointing the way for the bar to be raised ever higher.
Lesson 10 - Be Resilient: Technology Never Works 100%
In each class, pretty much something would inevitably NOT work - the internet, a microphone, or annoying feedback from Zoom and the physical classroom speakers. Being resilient to be able to revert back rapidly to engage with students in a low tech manner is vital. I don’t think we will ever achieve a world where a computer doesn’t want to reboot in the middle of a presentation, or where someone doesn’t freeze, or have their microphone unable to be unmuted. But the show must go on and being adaptable and resilient is a key educating skill.
Sometimes a colleague was sick and workload had to be picked up at a moment's notice, so you need to be across EVERYTHING. That just goes with the territory of education. It's harder than it looks and my respect for educators has profoundly increased over the years I have been teaching.
Summary
Late career teaching was wonderful. My time educating has been a career highlight for me - apart from the assessment work (which got easier with experience - but never very easy), I truly loved engaging adult minds in the topics and to see the light of interest in their eyes emerging (ok - not everyone - you never get everyone). And so for the effort I put in, I received back in more than full measure, and for that I thank my dear past students and colleagues. It has been wonderful to stay in touch with those students who have chosen to do so, and to see them progress in their careers.
I can’t thank everyone without missing out some names so forgive me in advance. But thank you...and if you have your own stories as students or educators to share or any feedback for me on this personal blog I’d love to hear from you. Paul
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