In January 2009, the MPA produced a report entitled Out of sight, out of mind: the trials and tribulations of distance education postgraduates . The report was widely disseminated within the university community, and included a set of recommendations to improve the services and support provided to distance education postgraduates. You can keep up with the latest developments and responses by visiting the MPA's Current Issues webpage.

DE students are invited to discuss the issues and responses.

I thank the honorable member for tabling this report.

As someone who has raised a number of issues with the MRGS, the MPA and the Library over the last 18 months, I feel bound to comment. As well as being a student of distance education, I am also someone who teaches via DE. I have done so at 3 other universities, including two of those identified as best practice within the report. Practices of DE are also a component of my thesis, albeit more from a pedagogical point of view than an administrative one.

So basically, I feel like I’m qualified to contribute to this debate!

In my opinion, Monash has made the same mistakes as many other Australian universities with DE. That is, they have enthusiastically grabbed hold of the honey pot without implementing any really supportive structures or processes to support external study. “How cool is that?”, the bean counters think to themselves. “People enrol, we get the money and we don’t even have to do anything. We just send them the odd email and put up a generic website.”

I was pleased to see that many of the issues I have raised since my candidature commenced were obviously reflected enough by other students to have been included in the report. It’s reassuring to note that I am not just a lone whinger. The lack of access to eXPERT seminars in particular is particularly annoying. I think it was one of the first things I ever posted here about. Monash seems to have world’s best practice in providing support and resources for post-graduates. But only if you attend a campus. I thought that the library’s response to the report typifies this. They claim they have not had specific complaints about loan times, for example. Yet I am happy to produce the email correspondence that I had with them over this very issue last year. Hiding behind Byzantine regulations, vague committee language and hair splitting was all part of the process.

So while I am here, I may as well bring up something else I have encountered recently: financial support for travelling to visit one’s supervisor.

Monash does have travel grants, but understandably they are more aimed at students travelling away from the campus to attend conferences or research trips. When I first enquired within my faculty whether a travel grant could be used for an off-campus HDR person to visit their supervisor (which is a requirement of candidature), I was told this was not possible. And it’s true that the travel grant website does not mention this usage of the travel money. http://www.mrgs.monash.edu.au/scholarships...avelgrants.html But because I am not easily discouraged, I downloaded the form anyway. And lo and behold, there was a clause in there to say that I could apply for a travel grant to visit my supervisor if I was confirmed as a distance student.

But bizarrely, this grant is not a grant. It’s the right to use a portion of the $2000 (or whatever it is) that has already been allocated to me as a research budget. And it doesn’t cover anything but airfares, and these values are capped according to destination. So I have to fill out a 16 page (!) form to apply for $180 of money that is already mine. And the cost of any accommodation, land transport etc is tough titties. Since my supervisor is at Gippsland, this component of my trip is actually way more than the Sydney-Melbourne airfare. Luckily Qantas were having a sale on, so I could get a return ticket for $140. But because I have to work at either end of the week, I don’t have long to spend at Gippsland. So I have to add on a hire car to maximize this time and of course, hotel accommodation.

The only reason is kind of get out cheaply is because I am flouting the rules and not visiting my supervisor as often as I am really bound to do by my HDR terms and conditions, which stipulate some bizarre requirement of two weeks residency every year. Like I can just use my annual leave and a couple of grand of my own money to sit around at a campus reading stuff off a computer screen for the sake of doing it somewhere else.

I do hope that others will contribute to this thread, as I think that Monash is starting to become receptive to the needs of DE students. I know that things may not be significantly improved during my study, but I hope that students in the future may have an easier path.

Although not affected myself, I had a look at the current issues page (and also had a glance at the report) after reading the article in the new Compass.

One thing that stuck out to me was the Library postage issue. Have they only looked at the postal service??? Have they ever looked at using couriers? It's just I used to work with a company many years ago and we were forever sending stuff off intrastate, interstate and also overseas, that would then need to be sent back - so we used pre-paid courier bags and would insert a bag in the parcel for the return to us. Because of the volume we sent the company got a very good rate from the courier company plus each bag was a known cost (in Oz dollars) so there was no issue with differing postal rates in different countries. It was also a safer method of sending stuff as it was all tracked. I figure a commercial company wouldn't use couriers unless it was cost-effective.

Yep, I can relate to all that. I certainly think you've hit that nail on the head when you say they gladly enrol us, take all the govt grants coming their way, and basically spend none of it on supporting the very students they have enrolled. That has been my experience for my entire candidature at Monash. It's a duty of care issue, and what irks me is that Monash isn't even subtle about it. It's so clear what is going on, and yet until now, no one is speaking up about it. So let's speak up.

Ok, so first, I want to know what your thesis topic is - I am most interested in knowing how DE fits into it, and also whether you need help collecting data? This is such an under-researched area. What can I do to help? Your experience sounds ideal for tackling the DE issue at Monash. I loved the bit about your experience at so-called top DE institutions in Australia. Someone like you is ideal for bringing these issues to light in a professional manner. I really want to enourage any other DE student out there reading this to also speak up. We need a voice. WE ARE THE VOICE. If we don't speak up, who else will (who even knows we exist?).

Second, I think you're right about the library issue. I think docdel is fantastic, but support has to go beyond that. One recommendation I have made is that depts/faculties need to allocate library funds exclusively for DE students, so they can enrol in local uni libraries close to where they live, to get borrowing priliveges. For example, I live in Singapore. National University of Singapore has a wonderful library which, for $500/year, I could join and get full borrowing privileges for anything I need, including online journals, books, etc. My argument is that I don't use office space, require a Monash-funded pc, printer, phone etc, nor do I use copying facilities, coffee/tea blah blah blah -- all the stuff internal students use - for free. I would bet that costs the uni $500/month per student, so all I'm asking is for $500/year (or whatever it is) for library access. It has to be funded at the faculty/dept level, but it should be automatic when you enrol as DE. There needs to be separate funding automatically applied when DE enrolment is accepted - funding for residentials, library memberships, software purchases, and software training.

Which brings me to your other point about residentials. I hear ya, loud and clear. Now, I've been DE at Monash for 7 years - this is my final year. I enrolled as HDR in Jul 2002, and expect to submit Dec 2009. Started full time, then went part time when I had my children. So, like you, I speak from experience. Back to residentials. I will have done 4 by the time I submit. My next (and last) is scheduled for May this year. First, on the length. According to latest (2008) guidelines, DE are now required to do only 5 days residential per year (equivalent FT/PT). Previously it was 15 days. It got reduced and it was not advertised anywhere. You just had to be lucky enough to find out through a conversation with a friend (which is how I found out). So that's clearly a flaw in how the university communicates with DE students.

Second, reducing it to 5 days says something very clear about the benefit of residentials - there are very few in my experience when you are expected to do it for onerous amounts of time. 15 days (3 weeks in effect) was a big waste of time for me, sitting around a campus having coffee with other HDRs, buying stationery, and doing very little work because the office I have when I come isn't MY office. It has nothing I need to get my Phd work done except a PC that for the first 3 days won't let me log in and a phone that rings continually because I've been allocated an office that used to be some help-desk person's office space. Yes, I meet 2 or 3 times with supervisors, but I do that now quite adequately by phone, so the benefit is really only minimal. As you say, it is really for the sake of supposedly doing your work somewhere else and that's about it. It certainly doesn't warrant 15 days on campus for me to feel 'connected'. Those 15 days residentials were nothing more than a 'tick the box' exercise for MRGS so that I could remain enroled as DE. I wrote that every year on my annual report, and when I saw that the residential is now reduced to 5 days, I figured someone finally read my annual report and saw the ridiculousness of it. I think 5 days is perfect and reasonable. I am so pleased and I am quite delighted to come for 5 days. It's not too long away from my real work, and just long enough to feel connected, check in with people that are important to my thesis, and again, tick the box for MRGS. Note too, that if you attend a conference, seminar, workshop (anywhere) with your supervisor(s) (one or both), that counts towards residential. So if the conference is 3 days and you are both there for 3 days and meet, say, once during that time, that counts towards residential.

Third, on funding. My dept now has a fund of $2000 for each DE student exclusively for residential costs. This is in addition to the faculty funding of $3500 that it provides to every HDR candidate. Only DE students in my dept qualify for it, and it covers any costs associated with residential - airfare, accom, transfers, meals, car hire, whatever. As long as you have a receipt and the expense makes sense (ie. you cannot claim something ridiculous), I am reimbursed up to $2000, no questions asked. Now, this grant was not installed until my second residential when my then supervisor (I've had 5 in 7 years but that is another story for another post, so don't get me started on that!) lobbied my HOD that it was grossly unfair to impose a policy that DE's have to attend the university and then provide no funding for it. She was adamant that as we don't incur any other costs to the dept (eg. office space, printing, copying, air we breathe on campus) that the dept had a duty of care to help DEs with residential costs because the university is insisting that we have to come to campus. The HOD agreed, and the policy is now in effect. HOWEVER, it remains poorly communicated. One DE in my dept came for 2 residentials and had no idea she was entitled to the grant until I mentioned it to her over coffee one day when we met up at an international conference. She was positively livid (as I would be in the same situation). So again, another challenge in that some good policies exist, in my dept at least, but they don't get communicated. A side note here - I was not allowed to back claim the $2000 to my first residential. So, my advice would be to use the example of my dept (Management, BUSECO) as to what other depts are doing for DEs and see if you can get your HOD to talk to my HOD and get it sorted for you.

(Also to let you know that I share your grief about Gippsland. I was briefly enrolled at G for 6 months of my candidature, which happened to fall over a scheduled residential, so I had the pleasure of having to do a 15 day residential out there (talk about lonely; I was also 5 months pregnant at the time with my first child, having traveled from the USA, and was accommodated in student accom where undergrads partied all night long). The costs were astronomical in train fares, transfers, accom etc because of the location. This was in fact the residential when my then supervisor got the funding installed because she saw that being in a remote campus adds significant additional expense to the whole idea of doing a residential as a DE).

Moving on to one final point which has bugged me for a long time. I think a fundamental problem about DE students is that we tend to think we are second class students because we are DE, so we don't speak up. We somehow feel we are at the mercy of the university because they granted us this 'exception' to study as DE and we therefore better not rock the boat, else we lose our privilege to study from a distance. I have often felt myself that the perception is that if we were really half decent, we'd just bite the bullet and study on campus right? I mean, look at what the international students do - they move countries and leave their families just to study on campus. I know that over my entire university education (14 years - all of which has been DE), I have often felt like that - that I better not complain because there's an implicit attitude that it is my choice to study DE and if there are no resources for DE then I should have somehow known about that before I chose this method of study. Basically, if I didn't do my homework before enrolling, then I should not be complaining now.
Another issue is the preception of DE study. I've had people say to my face that my degree, earnt as DE, is not worth more than what they could pull out of a cornflakes box (that is gods honest truth, not a word of a lie - someone in my last fulltime job said that to my face over lunch, when I was getting my undergrad degree by DE). So I think there is this fundamental perception that a degree earnt by DE has in many ways cut corners and is therefore not a real degree, because if it were a real degree there's no way our university would allow us to earn it as DE, right? They would insist we earn it internally which is the only proper way to get a degree. The problem is - there are FOUR THOUSAND DE POST GRADS AT MONASH. This style of learning is in no way an exception. This attitude that we are somehow not as adequate or our degree is in some way not as good as internals is, I believe, very obvious in the scholarships that are offered to HDRs. Have you noticed that if you are DE you cannot apply for nearly all of them. To apply for the doctoral completion scholarship, you must enrol to fulltime internal. Now, what is that really saying to a DE student? It says we don't trust you. Unless you are internal, we don't trust that you can complete. Never mind that you have studied for 3 years full time on your own and made fantastic progress, presenting at international conferences, winning best paper awards, and publishing in good/top journals, and completing your thesis on time and making really good progress. No. When it comes to the finish line, the university will reward internal students with completion scholarships, but the DE student gets excluded SOLELY on the basis of being DE. That makes no sense at all. It sends an entirely wrong message to DEs. If there are 4,000 postgrad DEs and the number is growing, we need equity in scholarships and resources (some exclusively just for DEs), and better communication about what we are actually entitled to.
Yvonne

Yvonne,

We have actually already exchanged emails over this last year. (My name is Mat.) At that time it was mianly the library issue that I was battling with. It went nowhere. I got a really unhelpful response from the PGA person who was on the library committee and then it degenerated into me having to make a formal submisison to committee, them coming back with the fact that I needed to give them formal permission to access my borrowing record so that they could investigate 'the case'....I gave up. I didn't want them to investigate a 'case', I wanted to push for policy change. Whatever.

My thesis is on collaborative content tools for online learning. Not just for DE but all tertiary students. In essence I am looking at models like Wikipedia and investigating what they have to offer a knowledge management and teaching tools.