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Question 14 asks the students about how much they use some of the various web services. I ask them which they use “regularly.” Blogs come in at less than 10%, wikis at 9%, Skype and similar at about 6% and podcasts at only 5%. Social networking sites such as FaceBook (59%) and MySpace (35%) are popular, but not as much as I would have expected. As soon as I can get the individual data report to run (if I can at all), I will be able to slice the data to look for age and gender differences in some of these sites. Instant messaging (28%) will probably also have some interesting data when broken down by age. (Click screenshot to enlarge)

Online shopping and online banking come in at lower percentages than when I ask the same questions of the educator audiences at presentations and workshops. Still, 64% engage in online banking.

For all the talk about electronic portfolios in higher education, our students come in at about 2% usage of this tool. Ouch.

Questions 15 & 16 aren’t interesting enough (to me, at least) to warrant inclusion in the blog. You can see the charts here. Question 15 asks about how many previous online courses they have taken: 28% are newbies but 36% have taken three or more previous online courses. Question 16 asks whether they intend to take more online courses: 14% don’t plan on it, but the majority do expect to.

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Question 13 looks at the technology devices that our students have and use. Digital still cameras top the list at over 78% ownership. Yes, most digital cameras also shoot video which means that the need to have a stand-alone digital video cam is decreasing all the time. Only a little over a quarter of the students report having a video camera. The biggest surprise to me is probably the less than a quarter of the students who have a webcam for their computer – either built-in or attached. Apparently the image of all the young people flirting on Stickam is not all that true. Of course, a lot of our students are not young, but still, a webcam is a great communication tool, IMO. (click screenshot to enlarge)

Laptop ownership exceeds desktop computer ownership, with a fair number of students having both. Less than half the students have a Wii, PS3, Xbox or similar gaming console. Makes a person question all the talk about how we need to develop all kinds of educational video games for our students. Cell phone ownership is high as would be expected, although not all students have one. Also, 16% have a cell phone but don’t have the capability of sending (or receiving, most likely) a text message. That also shows that we wouldn’t be ready to go to a service like Poll Everywhere (which I do like) on an exclusive basis, nor can we rely on text messaging as the major (or only) mode of communication in an emergency situation.

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Question 10 asked about which programs students were enrolled in. Nothing too exciting there.

Question 11 looks at Internet browser usage by students. Almost 90% of the students use either IE or Firefox, with IE still leading the way by more than a 2-to-1 margin. Still, the usage of Firefox has increased in the past couple of years; from 3% in 2005, to 9% in 2006 and now 21.6% in 2008 (no survey given in 2007). Me? I use IE only when I absolutely have to. Firefox first choice, use Chrome and Flock quite often as well. In fact, it’s not unusual for me to have all three of those browsers running at the same time. I also use Safari on a MacBook and I use Mozilla SeaMonkey. I also like ATT Pogo, but I’m not sure if it is going to continue or not. Maxthon and Avant Browser have some positive qualities as well. (Click screenshot to enlarge)

Nothing much different about question 11 where students indicate how many online courses they are taking during the current semester. We have lots of students who take only 1 or 2 online courses to fill in their on-ground schedule, plus we also have many students who are attending other colleges and taking one or two courses from us that count toward their degree programs at other schools.

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Question #9 in the 2009 LSC Student Technology Survey took a look at student uses of the LSC student e-mail system. Each student is assigned a student.lsc.edu address when they enroll at LSC. We have a college policy that makes e-mail an official means of communication for the college. We have the normal issues of getting students to read their e-mail when we send them out “important” messages – and yes, “importance” is definitely in the eye of the beholder. Our students think that much of the mail we send to them is SPAM. Of course the sender doesn’t think so. We are looking at several opt-in newsletters as ways of cutting down on the messages that not all students want to see. We’ll see how well that works. (Click image to enlarge)

As we saw in a previous post, most students (87%) have one or more additional e-mail accounts besides their LSC student account. We’ve often speculated that many of the students automatically forward their LSC message to another account. Mostly wrong – only 2.7% of the students report doing this.

About 80% of the students consider their school account to be a secondary e-mail account, not their primary account. That doesn’t surprise me at all. 11% say they will continue to use their LSC account after they leave the college. We have continuing conversations about whether we should give students a lifetime e-mail account in order to develop a more active alumni community and to keep some sort of tie to the college after they leave. Not sure how to read into the 11% figure. Not sure if that will be worth the effort. We may want to consider some sort of free option (Google, MS, etc) that allows them to keep an LSC e-mail addy without us having to manage their accounts on a regular basis. Again, we’ll see.

The most surprising news to me was the fact that 55% access their e-mail account through the student portal. The portal is less than two years old and I wasn’t sure how much traffic was going through the portal since they can still access all the services (including e-mail) without going into the portal. The portal is intended to be a single sign-on, one-stop-shop for all of our e-services. Quite frankly I didn’t think that this number of students were using it on a regular basis (at least not yet). So that’s a good thing.

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Question 6: During the current term, are you a part-time or full-time student? Full-time = 59%, part-time = 40%.

Question 7: Will you be employed during the upcoming (current) semester? No = 18.5%, Part-time = 55%, Full-time = 24.5% (Link to image of questions 6 & 7)

Question 8: How many hours each week, on average, do you normally spend using a computer or similar device (smart phone, etc) for each of the following activities? A) class assignments, B) playing computer games, C) online shopping and banking, D) e-communications, other than e-mail, E) reading and writing e-mail messages, F) listening to digital music, G) reading or writing blogs, H) Internet surfing for pleasure. (Click photo to enlarge)

• Only a few students (3.5%) spend much time (6 hours or more) reading and writing blogs each week. This helps confirm my suspicions that blogs are for old people (not that there’s anything wrong with old people).
• 32% say they don’t listen to digital music (or less than one hour weekly, anyway). That number is higher than I would expect.
• 24% say they don’t surf the Net for pleasure (really, not any kind of pleasure?). What the heck do they do with their lives? We may need some sort of intervention here.
• 55% say they spend time communicating online in ways other than e-mail. In a future post you’ll see the frequency with which they uses some of the other communications tools.
• Curious as to why a significantly larger percentage (about 15%) chose not to answer the questions about playing computer games and also about reading/writing blogs. Poor wording, or what?

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The wording for this question is a bit long-winded, but I really wanted to find out about the students’ self-assessment of their computer skills and ALSO about whether they have concerns about whether their skills will be sufficient for taking online courses. Next time I will try to find a better layout for the question so that there is not so much text. (Click image to enlarge)

Basically, 2/3 believe that they are experienced computer users, and only 4% consider themselves to be inexperienced with computers.

69% have no concerns about having the computer skills needed for an online course, while 30% do have some concerns. Of course this survey questions really begs the next question: what ARE the computer skills needed for online courses? We’ve debated that one a lot. Seems to be a lawyerly answer to that question: “It Depends!!”

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Question 3: How many email accounts do you have and check regularly?

As the graphic shows, only 13% have a single e-mail account that they use on a regular basis. 33% have three or more accounts. At LSC we assign every student an LSC-hosted e-mail account and we have a policy making e-mail the official means of communication with students. In fact, we don’t send out very much snail mail at all to enrolled students. Therefore, they “should” be using the LSC account on a regular basis. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of students use one or more alternate e-mail accounts in addition to the LSC account. (Click image to enlarge)

Question 4: Do you use wireless Internet access?

Almost 72% say they have a wireless system in their home. I was rather surprised by this number. Sure, it’s relatively cheap and easy to setup a wireless router in your house, but I still would have predicted something more like 35-40% would have done so. Wrong. Paying for wireless in public places is something that 99% of the wired students are not generally doing. you can put me in that crowd as well. Free is good.

Since about 81% use wireless somewhere and 71% use wireless at home, that leaves about 10% of the students who use wireless access points in other places but don’t have a router at home.

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This will be the first post of several as I report out on many of the results gathered from the 2009 Student Technology Survey at Lake Superior College. This year we had the largest number of submissions in the eight years that I have offered this survey. A total of 1,080 students submitted the voluntary survey.

The survey is posted inside Desire2Learn on the home page. Students who view the D2L page are encouraged to submit the survey through a News item. This is what the page looks like to all who enter. We have over 2.200 online students this year, but the survey is open to any student who enters D2L and chooses to complete the survey. Even though there may be a few students take the survey who are not taking online students; that group most likely represents a very small percentage of the total pool of submissions.

The first 2 questions help to determine how well the submissions represent the overall group. This is not statistical sampling in action, so it is informative to look for potential biases in the data. (Click image to enlarge)

The overall population of online students at LSC this term breaks down as 67% female and 33% male. Therefore, as with almost every survey we’ve ever given, we have greater representation of females than males. Yes, more females are likely to submit such a survey than are males. In a later post I’ll try to break down whether there are any significant differences in the survey results from females compared to males, which will help determine whether this difference is significant or not.

For the question about age, there is a greater percentage of survey submissions from older students than their representation in the population. The two categories for 30 and older students make up 27.2% of the survey submissions, but they only make up 21.5% of the online student population. When dealing with a survey about uses of technology, it seems logical that this would skew the results due to different technology use patterns among the generations. Does it? Actually, I don’t for sure since I haven’t been able to break down the data that way just yet. Look for that in a future post.

The survey data will lean slightly to female preferences and maybe even a bit more toward the preferences of older students. I’ll try to unravel what that might mean in future posts.

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