General Meta Comments on Interview Project
While reading through the lesson plan, Marlen Abraham, Michaela Bräuer, Marie Drescher, Maria Ermlich, Jennifer Hofmann, and Christina Schwerdtfeger wondered what the seminar title ‘Project Management’ actually meant. The course outline read as follows: “Project management is the art of planning, organizing and managing resources to ensure the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives (cf. Wikipedia). A project is a finite endeavour (having specific start and completion dates) undertaken to create a unique product or service which brings about beneficial change or added value” (see annotated university calendar).
Although we knew that we have to visit at least one conference during the semester, none of us really knew what our final project would look like.
The seminar was initially required for the fourth semester in our Master’s programme, but we were given the opportunity to take this course two semesters earlier. In April 2011, we had our first course meeting, where we discussed the content of the seminar. At first we were unsure what to expect of this course. Therefore, we were all quite excited when Prof. Schmied introduced the topic of conferencing by and invited us to the STHI Conference in Oberwiesenthal. Although, we were all quite excited about this, we were rather sceptical: What kind of project could we develop on the basis of the conference? How would this work? And what should it look like?
As the conference was organized by the Saxon-Czech University Initiative, a large number of Czech lecturers and students were expected to attend the EAP conference in Oberwiesenthal. Fortunately, Prof. Schmied had the idea to compare Czech and German universities in terms of their English language programmes. We therefore decided to conduct interviews during the three days of the conference. During the preliminary stage of our project, we brainstormed possible questions that we could ask our interviewees. As we always bore in mind that we were doing a comparison of the English programmes of German and Czech universities, we focused on aspects that could be compared to our courses at CUT. We decided that it was important to conduct interviews with both lecturers and students in order to receive results that would adequately represent the English courses of all universities.
Prior to the conference, we met in our teams and compiled all our ideas. The film group borrowed the video cameras fromthe English department at TUC and the interview group agreed on the interview questions, and finalized a list with 43 questions for students and 23 for lecturers (see Interview questions).
During the confernce, while conducting the interviews, we realized that some questions were irrelevant, as most of the Czech students studied English with a different focus than we had assumed. We soon realized that some questions on our list did not apply to all of the students and lecturers attending the conference, and were thus omitted. The same was true for questions that were answered by the interviewees in previuos answers. Whenever we realized that a question was already 'indirectly' answered by a person, we either left this question out, or asked for a more detailed answer.
As the Czech students and lecturers were unknown to us, we wanted to break the ice and have conversations with them during the coffee breaks between presentations. While talking to them, we introduced us and our project and asked for permission to interview them later becasue the coffee breaks were rather short for conducting interviews. Our intention was to include all participating universities in our project, which were: Chemnitz University of Technology, Masaryk University Brno, University of South Bohemia České Budějovice, University of South Bohemia České Budějovice, University of West Bohemia Pilsen, Technical University of Liberec, and Jan Evangelista Purkyně University Ústí nad Labem (UJEP).
We were glad that all of our interviewees were cooperative and willing to participate in our project. They all seemed very interested and even during get-togethers at the end of the day it came to insightful conversations about the differences and similarities between German and Czech students of English. However, the most interesting discussion on the topic was held during the Student Forum on the first evening, when Czech and German students exchanged their experiences regarding their studies. During the Student Forum, the film group was very busy with filming the lively discussion. But we realized that, although filming allowed us to later review the discussion and the most interesting findings of it, it seemed to intimidate some students. We therefore wondered if there would have been an even more animated discussion, had it not been for the video cameras.
In the weeks following the conference, every member of the interview group transcribed four interviewsthat each of us conducted in Oberwiesenthal. After transcribing all interviews, we summarized them in form of an excel sheet to get a visualized overview of the interviews and to draw first conclusions. In October 2011, we decided with the input from Prof. Schmied that it would be a good idea to create a homepage as a means of presenting our results.
In further meetings, we realized that in order to compare Czech universities with Chemnitz University of Technology, we also needed to conduct the interviews with students and lecturers of our own university. As we ourselves are students of English at CUT, the members of the interview group answered the interview questions that we had asked our fellow students from Czech Republic at the conference in Oberwiesenthal. We also interviewd two staff members of the English department to represent the lectureres at CUT.
Although we were worried at first that we would not gather enough material for this project, we later had to realize that we had too much information to effectively present in form of a website. We therefore selected only the most relevant information for our homepage.
Working as a group meant that all tasks were divided equally. Our project management group was split into two teams: an interview team (Jennifer, Maria, Marie, and Michael) and a film team (Christina and Marlen). The film team captured the entire conference on film and edited the material gathered in order to create a short video clip (which you can see on this website). The interview team conducted interviews with the participants of the conference. Each member of this group interviewed four people and later transcribed their interviews. To gain an overview of the contents of the interviews, Maria created an excel table (see Summary Interviews) where all group members had to insert their parts. As this table was far too extensive, Maria decided which questions and answers were most relevant for the comparison of the English programmes of the different universities. As most of us were unfamiliar with creating a homepage, we were glad that Jennifer took over the technical part and created the homepage you can see here. Marie wrote the texts about the project and the conference and put the texts of the other group members together, in order to ensure a unified writing style. Michaela wrote the meta comments on the recording process of the interviews and proofread the uploaded texts on the webpage. The two members of the film group,Marlen and Christina, apart from editing and cutting the video material, gathered information about the Czech Universities that served as background information for this project.
In the course of our work on this project, we realized what it means to manage a project. The time of preparation, the time during the conference in Oberwiesenthal, and the processing of our results, showed us what it means to work in a team to achieve a common goal, which in our case was the realisation of this website. This also entailed a lot of meetings, sleepless nights and differences of opinion. Despite initial scepticism, we were a great team and are now proud to present you the results of our project on this platform!
