Student experiences and expectations of technology

Student experiences and expectations of technology

The Students' Experiences and Expectations of Technology Survey (SEETS) was designed to provide USQ with an understanding of how its student's are currently using the technologies they have access to in support of their learning and how they might like (intend) to use them in the future. It also investigated the differences between their use of technologies for academic purposes compared to their use in everyday life. This survey was previously used by three universities in Sydney in 2010; Macquarie, UTS and UWS (Gosper, Malfroy, McKenzie & Rankine, 2011), and was broadly based on both the ECAR Survey, originally developed by EDUCAUSE (ECAR, 2008) and the Great Expectations of IT Survey (JISC, 2008) from the United Kingdom. To help determine which tools should be included in the survey reference was made to the work of The Horizon Project, a project of the New Media Consortium (http://www.nmc.org/horizon). However, it was also recognised that not all student, and in this case USQ students, have access to, or use the latest technologies (Kennedy, et al., 2008), it was therefore important to ensure this survey also covered the use of more traditional technologies (email, SMS, mobile phones), together with the more recent cloud based technologies. There were twenty-five (25) different technologies covered by the survey, along with the LMS. These included: instant messaging, text message (SMS), email, collaborative/conferencing technologies, mobile phones for voice calls, mobile phones with internet access, social networking sites, virtual worlds, blogs, wikis, online multi-user computer games, podcasts/webcasts, social bookmarking/tagging, software used to create audio/video materials, presentation software, data analysis software, Google docs, e-portfolios, GPS tagging, library search engines, internet search engines, RSS feeds, interactive whiteboards, web development software, and tablet computers. The survey was administered in 2012 and was open to all USQ students and was delivered online. The survey received 1181 valid responses. All respondents were offered the opportunity to participate in a series of follow-up focus groups to be run later in Semester 2 2012, of which Thirty-four students participated. Participants in these groups answered a series of question that had been developed after the survey data had initially been analysed. These questions were designed to provide further insight to the main themes arising from this analysis. The poster will provide a summary of the finding from this survey and focus groups. The findings suggest that students largely want to use a range of technologies to enhance their experience in the online environment, but within certain constraints and with a lot more consistency among the different environments they use. For example they clearly indicated they wanted a more consistent use of tools like, lecture capture, virtual classrooms, e-portfolios and mobile apps. They wanted their communications to be provided predominantly through the LMS and via email. They used social media, but they didn't want that space to be mixed up (confused) with what they needed to do in their learning space.

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