UOW academic delivers purpose-built doctoral course to a Swedish university

Mar 21, 2007

A University of Wollongong academic has just completed what is believed to be an Australian first by teaching and assessing a purpose-built course targeted at Information Systems doctoral students and academic staff at Karlstad University in Sweden.

In the Swedish system, and in a number of other European countries, doctoral programs are four years full-time and require students to attend relevant doctoral level courses.

Associate Professor Rodney Clarke, Director of the Centre for Applied Systems Research within UOW’s School of Management and Marketing, was invited by Karlstad to develop and deliver a doctoral course called “Systems in Context” for its current crop of Information Systems students.

Professor Clarke said the doctoral course was intense because of time constraints – it had to be delivered over long days and every day in less than a fortnight.

“I had to be prepared because the students are extraordinarily well trained and are used to picking holes in arguments. It was a challenging subject to teach and the Karlstad students challenged me right back. It truly was an example of co-learning,” Professor Clarke said.

Professor Clarke’s course and his research work concerns understanding the relationship between organisations and information systems.

His work follows the so-called Scandinavia tradition that emphasises a human-centred approach in information systems research.

“Computing technologies that are the focus of traditional computing science and ‘informatic’ engineering concentrate primarily on technical problems, but organisations are mainly concerned with how to best use the investment in technology that they have already made and how to best use the technical skills they already possess,” he said.

“Their problems are often social problems -- how to communicate and coordinate to achieve organisational ends. It works out that often the technical problems are not as difficult as the social problems. It’s actually the soft problems that are hard!”

Professor Clarke has pioneered an approach to modelling work that includes aspects of the immediate situational context in which technology is used as well as the organisational culture or ‘how the technology is used around here’.

The approach is based on looking at recurring communication patterns in organisations to determine the structure and function of the work.

If there is a change to the way an organisation does a particular type of work, or if there are changes in the immediate situation in which the work is occurring, then we see a change in the structure and function of the work pattern.

Karlstad University has invited Professor Clarke to develop another course this year.