Information Technology Reference
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into smaller parts. Consequently, many lecturers do not take cognitive style into account in
their teaching practice. This last statement gives no indication of the stresses that many
Australian academics face as they seek to achieve more with fewer resources. Increases in
class sizes and decreases in government funding have occurred, while the number of
academics has remained relatively stable. The introduction of performance management,
quality controls, and the need to raise revenue combine with the aforementioned problems
to add to the general levels of stress in the profession. Accordingly, most academics
compromise when it comes to educational practice and aim to produce something that is
acceptable rather than excellent.
TEACHING STYLES IN AUSTRALIAN
UNIVERSITIES
One of the discussion topics being considered at the Australian Universities reform
working party is whether Australian academics should have a teaching qualification. A
teaching qualification has been a prerequisite for many academic appointments made in the
last 10 years. Most Australian universities provide in-service courses for lecturers, and these
include theories of learning and teaching. However, many academics are “time served” in that
they have many years of teaching experience but no formal or accredited training. The
evaluations carried out in most universities and faculties do little to measure the effectiveness
of teaching and become instead measurements of lecturer and subject popularity. Many
academics were appointed on the basis of research and publication, and good researchers
do not necessarily make good teachers.
A distinction needs to be made between pedagogy and teaching style. The latter
depends on a number of personal factors and is often idiosyncratic, because personality
plays a major part in curriculum delivery. In an effort to examine the factors that influenced
teaching style most, I interviewed 20 academics. While the interviews were informal, I found
that the greatest influence on teaching style had nothing to do with teacher training or
education. Instead, academics developed teaching styles and approaches based on their own
experiences at college and university, basing their teaching practice on academic role models
they had found personally appealing, while avoiding practices and styles used by lecturers
they had found boring, ineffectual, or inept. All interviewees had some awareness of
personality types and cognitive styles, but only two used this in their own teaching. It would
seem that the remaining members were teaching to classes they imagined to be predominantly
like themselves. The potential for teaching and cognitive style mismatch between staff and
students is quite obvious. In addition, I found myself asking whether the mindset of
Australian Information Systems Academics was suited to the present conditions.
THE INFORMATION SYSTEMS ACADEMIC
MINDSET
By the early 1970s, Information Systems was beginning to appear in the curriculum of
major American universities. As an emerging discipline, it was neither pure science nor social
science, and its paradigms and infrastructure were ill-defined (Benson & Standing, 2002;
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