* * * The RESULTS are in * * *
Below you will find the results of a survey conducted by a branch of EDUCAUSE, which is a nonprofit association who centers itself on helping higher education advance in its use of educational technology.
ECAR has surveyed undergraduate students annually since 2004 about technology in higher education. In 2013, ECAR collaborated with more than 250 higher education institutions to collect responses from more than 112,000 undergraduate students about their technology experiences and expectations. The findings are distilled into four broad themes to help educators and higher education institutions better understand how students experience technology on their respective campuses and the ways in which new, better, or more technology can impact students’ relationship with information technology.
Educause, 2013
With the data they collected, they were able to pull out key findings and offer recommendations based on the responses given.
Your Turn:
Having gone over the data gathered from the ECAR survey, their key findings and recommendations, we now ask you to participate in a survey. This survey centers itself on the MET program and is derived from the ECAR’s survey. It is short and has been simplified in order to give you the experience of taking such a survey, and then analyzing the data to come up with key findings and recommendations.
- Please complete the survey by FRIDAY NOVEMBER 8, 2013. It is imperative you complete it before this date, the more participants the better the results!
- Check back on SATURDAY NOVEMBER 9, 2013 to review the RESULTS. Use what you have learned so far this week to analyze the data, provide key findings and recommendations.
- To participate in this discussion simply reply below.
I’m seeing the data roll in! It looks interesting, keep it coming, as it sure will be informing!
A big THANK YOU to all those who took the time to take the survey. You can now find the results at the top of the page. Looking forward to your posts!
Thanks so much for conducting the survey. The results are very interesting. I really appreciate the ways the results are laid out – so simplistic and user friendly.
Is it that tablets are taking over the e-reader market? Or that people have not fully bought into the e-books yet? I really enjoy using my Kobo and find it much more solid and easier to throw in my bag when I’m going on a trip or going to the beach to read. If I damage it, it is also less than $100 to replace compared to a $500+ tablet.
I am also sensing a push in our district to move away from desktop computers/laptops and move to tablets. It is interesting that at the post-graduate level we are relying on laptops primarily. I can see the value that tablets present through apps, but for many purposes laptops are still king. Sorry desktops… We’ll still keep you around as long as you continue to work properly.
I thought the suggestions on how instructors can use technology more effectively were spot on. The opportunities to interact synchronously with tools like Google Hangouts are often set up by students and are not embedded in the course. It would be interesting to have several synchronous sessions as part of each course. This was the first MET course that involved a guest speaker. The Makerspaces group did an excellent job setting this up and it seems like a brilliant idea to include this sort of opportunity as part of every course.
Great job this week team! This was a very informative and well thought out OER. Thanks for all of your hard work!
Hi alemon,
I agree, this week’s OER has really given me insight into a market I originally knew nothing about. I think it makes sense that we are relying on laptops, although I do see that changing in the future. At the moment, I have yet to see anything educational at the post-graduate level on a tablet which isn’t just as effective on a laptop. I think the ‘extra affordances’ offered by tablets at the moment are primarily for gaming and beginner education experiences.
Incredible survey learning analytics team; the results were presented in a really easy to understand manner. Thanks for all your hard work this week!
Dave
Hello alemon and Dave,
I really enjoyed conducting this survey and seeing the responses flow in. It is the first time I have conducted a survey in this manner, and can really see the benefits of it. It can really open the eyes of teachers or stakeholders (depending on the purpose of the study) on strengths/weaknesses.
As per the results, it was very interesting to see that Laptops are predominantly used for academic purposes over desktops and/or tablets. I do agree Dave, tablet affordances at the moment seem to lie in the entertainment department and educational apps.
As for E-readers, no one surveyed plans to buy an E-reader within the next year. It may be because they already have a tablet and do not see the purpose of having an E-reader, when they can access books on their tablets in the same fashion.
My goal was to present the data in a clear manner, and I’m glad that it was conveyed this way. The last thing someone wants to do is read statistical information in a spreadsheet. If you want the statistics to speak to the viewers it has to be presented in a way that will be concise, engage them and is visually stimulating.
Milena
This is a very attractive presentation of the survey data. Having no experience with these type of tools, I am curious as to which tools were used to produce it. Are the presentation options available in Google Docs or was the data imported into another program?
Thank you.
The survey was conducted through Google surveys, the results are automatically tabulated in a spreadsheet. The pie graphs were created through Gooogle’s spreadsheet. Here is a link I found on YouTube for creating graphs within the spreadsheet to give you an idea of how I did it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dku0YkbUBg8 . For all the other information I calculated the percentages and presented it in tables, etc. using Word to create the visual presentation.
The results seem to confirm a few beliefs that I have developed through participation in this program:
– most participants are very familiar/comfortable with technology
– even in this program, technology could be used more effectively
– there seems to be an appetite for more ‘face time’ whether synchronous or asynchronous
I find it very interesting that only 15.4% of us (in a completely online program) feel we learn best in an online environment and approx. 7.6% of us feel we learn best offline.
We all have beliefs and opinions based on our experiences, as you’ve mentioned even through the MET program these are created. Seeing your beliefs which were once just and individual opinion based on what you’ve seen/heard, now presented through stats further justifies and conceptualizes in a concrete way what once was just an opinion.
Nothing is perfect, but we can try bridging the gap. That is why conducting surveys and the whole concept of Learning Analytics brings us closer to bridging that gap to perfection. In the sense that the information that comes out of surveys helps to take a program/stakeholders/teachers etc. in a direction that will help them solve some of the gaps that may be apparent after getting back the results to their survey.
This survey clearly shows that there is something that many students feel is missing from the program -video/audio conferences, lectures, guest speakers, etc. I wonder if more of this will pop up in courses in the future…
It is interesting that only 15.4% believe they learn best in a completely online environment seeing as our program in completely online. However, 41.7% of students have never taken online courses before entering MET. We may be able to speculate that those who do not feel they learn best in a completely online environment are lacking the face time – video/audio communication which according to the survey appears to be missing from many of the courses offered in MET.
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