Educause Boulder the IT Experiences of Faculty and Students 2017 ECAR Findings

Educause Boulder The IT Experiences of Faculty and Students 2017 ECAR Findings

Welcome to EDUCAUSE Live! everyone. This is Christopher Brooks, Director of Research with EDUCAUSE. I'll be your moderator for today's eLive webinar.

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Our webinar today is, "The IT Experiences of Faculty and Students: The 2017 ECAR Findings." Faculty and students are arguably the most important end users of the efforts of IT units to provide effective and reliable technologies. In this session, we will offer some highlights from and conversation about the results of our 2017 student and faculty technology surveys, which used data collected from over 35,000 students and 11,000 faculty. Topics covered in this year's reports include campus IT experiences, student and faculty IT experiences, and teaching and learning with technology.

I'm delighted to be joined by my colleague today, Jeffrey Pomerantz, Senior Researcher at EDUCAUSE. With that, let's begin.

Thank you, Christopher.

This is Jeffrey Pomerantz. Thank you for joining us. I, as Christopher just said, am a Senior Researcher with EDUCAUSE; and Christopher Brooks is the Director of Research. Thank you for joining us for this eLive.

We, as you may be aware, recently published two studies…the Study of Faculty and Study of Undergraduates and Information Technology. Those are available online; and if Jodi could post a link to the URL on the EDUCAUSE site where those are available, that would be terrific. Those are available in PDF; and for the first time, EDUCAUSE has published those in HTML. So they are interactive; and you can view them on any device, which is an exciting new development for us. These studies are the latest in a series that goes back several years. We have over a decade of student data, but these reports just report on the most recent iteration of these studies.

Before we begin, I have a question for you all. That is: Has your institution ever participated in either of these student or faculty studies?

We'll give that a moment for you all to enter your responses, and we'll see what our audience looks like in terms of whether you are a possible data point in our studies. If you are, thank you very much. We could not do what we do without your participation in this work.

[Pause for responses]

Looking at this, Jeffrey, it's kind of interesting that we have a lot of people that don't know whether or not their institutions participate. So this might be something for them to consider asking around to their IT units to see if they have or perhaps even leverage that to encourage them to think about participating in the future.

Yes, and, Jodi, thank you. She has posted a link in the Chat area to these studies. You can also get to more information about the ETRAC studies at that link, and we have a slide about that coming up in just a

1 Educause Boulder The IT Experiences of Faculty and Students 2017 ECAR Findings moment. But if you don't know or if you are one of the "No's," then you can find out more information about ETRAC, perhaps talk to folks in the IT unit. We would very much welcome your participation in that; and, of course, the goal is that you would receive data that is useful for internal uses at your institution as well.

All right, it looks like we're not getting any more responses, so I will move on to the next slide. Excellent… thank you.

Okay, so –

I'm sorry, I was just going to say Jamie has posted a link to more information about ETRAC on the Why ETRAC URL that's in the Chat right now.

Sorry, Christopher, go on.

No, no, that's perfectly all right. I was just going to say one thing off of the poll that we just did there. I noticed that we had a 0% for those who had only done the faculty study by itself. And I think part of the explanation for that is that we've done the student data for 14 years, but only have done the faculty study for 3 and have skipped a couple of years here since the last one.

So typically, I think, when institutions sign up to do one, they tend to do both. So if you're interested in participating in this year's studies or even finding the reports themselves, you can go to the "Research Studies Hub," listed here with this (inaudible) URL.com/2017FS. That's for the student study and faculty study. And I tested it earlier; it does work with lower case, as well as all upper case there.

And when you scroll down to that on that page, about one-third of the way down, you can actually click the link that will take you to the place that Jamie Reeves has put into the Chat there to think about signing up for the ETRAC studies themselves.

The timeline that we have laid out here for signing up and executing the 2018 student study, and last month we opened up the portal for institutions to begin to review who the primary reps are and to set their survey administrative status. It's during this period between now and the first of February that institutions can submit all of their planning forms and work on getting their IRD approvals and so forth and getting that all established in the ETRAC portal.

Beginning February 5th is when we will see kind of the finalization of institutions setting those dates, drafting their invitations to their students, and creating their own marketing plan internally. At some point during that period of time…in fact, it can be the entire period from February 5th to April 20th…you can actually have your respective surveys open and live and collecting that data. Once your survey is implemented, we'll send out the links to the students and also monitor the response rates as the come in.

Once we close those out, that's when the fun for us really begins…where we start to clean the data and to prepare it for delivery to the participating institutions. So we'll take that raw data and clean it up, put that into the portal so that it can be used for benchmarking purposes. And then those of us who are down in the weeds abdomen doing the research on this, we'll begin to crunch the numbers to produce the 201 Student Study. So this is the general timeline. You still have a couple of months yet to sign up and get your paperwork in order. We go live with the survey at the start of February.

With that, let's switch over and get to some of the substance of the results. What do you think, Jeff?

Absolutely.

So just a brief overview of the recently published studies. The Faculty Study, like Christopher said, is offered every other year approximately; and this current iteration, we had responses from over 13,000 faculty members, which is quite a good number. Those of you who work with faculty know how hard it can be sometimes to get them to respond to surveys.

2 Educause Boulder The IT Experiences of Faculty and Students 2017 ECAR Findings

One hundred and fifty-seven institutions from seven countries, 37 states, represented. We're quite happy with that response rate. For the report itself, we just looked at U.S. institutions; and that brought our total sample size down to 11,000-plus responses. We just focused on U.S. institutions, of course, because that was the lion's share of the data that we had; and we, of course, maintain all of the data from institutions outside of the U.S. If any of you are joining us from institutions outside the U.S., we don't just dup that data. We hold onto it; we look at it; we use it for other purposes. But for these reports, they're just U.S.- focused.

The Student Survey, now…the Student Survey, we had responses from 124 institutions and 43,000, almost 44,000, students. Again, 10 countries including the U.S., 40 U.S. states. For the Student Survey, again, we focused on U.S. institutions…110 institutions within the U.S. So the survey reports on a sample size of almost 36,000 responses. So the point here is we had a very large "N," and that allows us to have quite a lot of statistical power in the analyses that we make.

Oops, excuse me. I hit the wrong button for moving forward…there we go. Sorry about that, folks.

So the way we wrote the Faculty and the Student reports…we very deliberately wrote them so that they are parallel. The section headers, the section titles, are slightly different between the two reports; but they are the same topics across both reports so that if you were so inclined, you could lay the reports side by side on your desk and compare results across faculty and students and see similar findings.

The graphics, which you'll see throughout the next hour, are similar across the two reports as well. The topics that we address are that of ownership of devices; the overall experience of IT on campus and where respondents get their tech support; experience of technology in the classroom; use of technology in the classroom; and security, the experience of information security on campus; what tools and technologies are being used in the classroom by faculty and what students say that they are using, both in the classroom and for their work; and then what are the most important types of tools for student success; preferences for the technology that students are using, preferences for what faculty would like to use in the classroom and want to learn more about; and then experience of mobile devices in the classroom and faculty's policies about use of mobile devices in the classroom.

So again, the data that's reported in the faculty and the student studies are parallel so that you can compare across what students say about such and such versus what faculty say about the same thing. So that was a very deliberate decision that we made in how to present our findings this time around.

Now we have a second poll for you. This is an opportunity for us to kind of get to know you a little bit to help us figure out who we're talking to today: What is your current role?

We'll give it a couple of moments to allow you to fill this out. It looks like most of you are in IT units, with a fairly solid contingent of campus leaders. That's excellent.

That's really good to see.

Yes, it is. By and large, our primary audience for these sorts of reports are campus leadership and IT units. A lot of the reporting that we do in these two reports are geared at what it is that campus leadership and IT units on campus can do to support student success, et cetera. But, of course, those findings have implications for what faculty are going to do in the classroom, what instructional designers and librarians can do to support that work. So this is very helpful to see, thank you.

All right, it looks like our responses have stabilized; so I will move on.

Now we're going to get into some of the real meat of the program matter here, and we're going to start off by exploring the experiences of IT on campus for both faculty and students. Part of the way that Jeff and I have designed this presentation for you is to play off of what he mentioned earlier in terms of being able to compare these data side by side. So we're going to have kind of a little bit of a color response, kind of

3 Educause Boulder The IT Experiences of Faculty and Students 2017 ECAR Findings dynamic taking place where we're going to explore on one end the faculty and then the students and then both at the same time so that you can see them there.

The first thing that we're going to start off with is looking at where students turn to for tech support. This, in many ways, is a stable and important function and feature that IT organizations offer across campuses. And understanding how they're used or how they're perhaps not being used, I think, can be very informative to making policy decisions and changing the structure of these things.

When we first look at – this was kind of surprising when we first pulled up this data because we had this very clear break between the top three items and the bottom tier of things that you observe there. And what Jeff and noticed very quickly is that those top three…the figuring out on your own, the searching on the Internet via Google, YouTube, and other online sources, or asking your friends…literally sort of exhibits something of a DIY attitude that the students have when it comes to trying to engage with export. They either have the time on their hands to try to figure it out on their own and to play with these things; they just might have a mentality that is very much about fixing it themselves, and by doing it they learn how to do it; but it also could reflect something else, which might be a degree of not having really the expertise to find the answers to things as efficiently as they might be provided by a formal form of tech support.

We also speculated, I think, in the report that this also might be a function of the time of day in which perhaps students are seeking their tech support as well. A lot of tech support services are in person; or even if they are by phone, a lot of times students might need to export after hours so that they are perhaps pursuing these things on their own. It's only after they exhaust those that they really begin to think about seeking possible sources of expertise on the subject matter; and that's using the college and university Help Desk services, as well as asking their instructors. One-quarter of students say that they are doing those respective things.

This is a bit of a different picture than we observed with faculty…correct, Jeff?

Yes, and somebody just posted…Jim Brandon asks how the percentages add up. Respondents could check more than one box to indicate that they seek tech support in multiple ways, so these obviously don't sum to 100%. But what we see with faculty that's quite different from students is the top item is that faculty go to the Help Desk for support and then figure it out on their own and search Google and ask their peers and colleagues and whatnot.

I think this speaks very strongly to a difference in information-seeking behavior by students versus faculty. Where students may have this DIY approach for all the reasons Christopher just said, faculty are more likely to use a source that they perceive as authoritative, that is authoritative, the help desk. But also, faculty exist in a reputation environment; that's entirely the arena of research and teaching faculty is this reputation economy. And so, of course, they are more likely to seek information from what they might perceive as authoritative sources.

And it, I think, speaks to something that IT help desks can do to support faculty…I mean, one has to imagine faculty aren't going to the help desk in the student union or the library or wherever the help desk is. They're more likely to be calling or using a Web form or whatnot.

Then far down the list you get things like asking your teaching and research assistants. So students and research assistants are providing a technology support to faculty, just going probably a bit unnoticed in that role.

Our next slide, we compare the two figures side by side; and what becomes clear here is the difference in prioritization between how students and faculty go about seeking information…like I just said, going to the help desk versus the DIY approach.

Christopher?

I think one of the recommendations that we made with regards to perhaps getting students to utilize the resources that are available to them on campus is to think about ways in which that DIY process that students are engaging in, and are probably likely to continue engaging in, might be to curate in a good place or a single place for them to actually be able to find answers to the difficult solutions. I know that a lot of IT organizations probably already do this to some degree; but if students are trying to figure it out on their own and are willing to look at Google or YouTube sources, if those could be curated by an IT organization and its help desk and put in a place that's accessible to them 24/7 from wherever they happen to be, that might see a little on the uptick side for students beginning to use those respected or more expert resources for finding support for their technology needs.

Anything else, Jeffrey?

No, let's move on to the next slide. I've got that. The next set of slides is on device ownership…so what devices do students and faculty own…Christopher?

Okay, so this figure basically is mapping out the intersectionality of device ownership for four different types of devices. You can see there on the outskirts there, they're labeled tablets, smartphones and tablets…so a combination of those two…and smartphones. Then on the right-hand side are laptops, laptops and then desktops, and then desktops by themselves.

As you scroll down on the diagonals for each of those respective things, whatever cell that you happen to be in represents an intersection of the ownership for those respective things. This year, we have some pretty interesting things that are coming out in terms of student device ownership. I think historically we have the majority of students owning pretty much owning at least one of the respective devices we've asked about.

But this year, the plurality…it's not an absolute 50% majority…but the plurality…that is, the group that has the most…are those that are just owning smartphones and laptops and are not owning desktops and tablets themselves. Indeed, what we actually have observed in the data this year is a decline in tablet ownership among undergraduate students. We think that this might be in part due to the increased functionality of laptops…sort of borrowing things like touchscreen interfaces and other things from the tablet itself, and then a lot of the slick functionality of tablets that can be performed in an app-based environment can be taken care of on the smartphone.

So we really see those two devices perhaps squeezing out the tablet as being a viable device that students are really seeking to own. That said, still we have roughly one-third, 30%, of students who are owning all three of those respective devices. But the trend is actually pretty clear in the data that we look at in terms of how many students are actually owning these devices and how important they are to their learning endeavors.

For the first time in a while, we asked about desktops this year; and I think we were pleasantly surprised to see that a lot of students are still owning desktops. So that medium shaded rose color that says all four, 17%...that reflects students that own at least one of all four of these different types of devices.

Now, student ownership patterns of technology is a little bit different than that of faculty; and that's what Jeff is going to address now.

Right, and again, read this figure the same way you read the student ones…on the diagonals. The first thing I want to point out is the surprisingly large, at 3%, of faculty who own none of the above devices. But again, the largest block, at 26%, is faculty who own one of each of all four of these devices…desktop, laptop, smartphone, and tablet. So that was a bit of a surprise to us…that faculty have one of each and use them for different purposes.

One of the things that we don't have a slide for in this presentation but that is in the report…so you may want to take a look at…is who bought the faculty member's devices. Institutions are still providing desktops to a large percentage of faculty, but faculty then go and frequently buy their own laptop. So

5 Educause Boulder The IT Experiences of Faculty and Students 2017 ECAR Findings there is an interesting combination happening here of institutionally provided and personally owned devices that faculty are bringing to campus, and that has information security implications to be sure.

So all four devices is the largest percentage, and after that you've got laptops combined with smartphones and tablets. So there's a fairly sizeable…almost a quarter of faculty own those three devices but not a laptop.

Let me move on to the next slide, which again is a comparison of the two. What you can see is that that bottom left center quadrant is the heaviest, the darkest shaded, for both students and faculty. But what the darkest shaded cell…the cell that represents the most responses owning those devices, are slightly different across the two. For students, it's smartphones and laptops; for faculty, it's all four.

But what we're seeing is this sort of drift a little bit away from desktops…that laptops seem to be overtaking desktops as devices that are most frequently owned.

Oh, that and we can also see the faculty also because presumably they have larger incomes than their students, have the capacity to perhaps own more and so perhaps have to be less efficient in terms of what sorts of devices they choose to own. Students, it seems, are becoming actually much more efficient, I think, in many ways in terms of what it is that they're carrying in their backpacks. So we might be sort of converging to a position that echoes the Lord of the Rings where we have one device to perhaps rule them all, but we still might be a little bit away from that particular dynamic in the immediate years here.

Anything else before we press on then?

Yes, there is one thing actually. There is a conversation happening in the Chat about ownership. One of our statisticians, Mike [Rodema], points out that these graphics are about personal ownership of devices although we do also ask about institutional devices. So this is something that Mike is clearing up in the Chat but is also explained, I think, in a little bit more detail in the reports themselves.

Okay, let's move on to the next side…oops, I over skipped it again. There we go.

So now that we know what students are owning, we also asked them about how they're actually using them in class. This is particularly revealing; and perhaps it plugs into a little bit of great Thanksgiving laptop ban debates of 2017 because this provides us with some information about how actually students claim to be using their respective devices in class.

We see here…it's kind of interesting…the first line that we have there is those who do not typically use at all; and tablets, you can see, half the students claim that they don't really typically use tablets at all, and smartphones are second. But laptops are at the bottom of that. When we look at the opposite side of the data for that, we see that laptops are actually the workhorse for students when it comes to digital technologies.

The next line there is the one, of course, which draws the ire of faculty and some students alike; and that's using the devices for non-class activities. That could be any number of things that are deemed to be off-task. The number one culprit that we see there is smartphones. Students tend to use smartphones for non-class activities in class the most. This could very well be because it's looked down upon, or they feel the need to be discreet, or it could very well be the dominant technology for them receiving personal communications via text or S&S.

And then laptops because they are used quite a bit more frequently than any of the other technologies here are the second most for engaging in non-class activities. So I don't think it's ever been our position that students don't get distracted by their technologies…that they do, in fact, do that some and they do engage in non-class activities. But they also use them in some very serious and dedicated ways to taking care of their coursework while they're actually in class.

As you can see there with the remaining three items…using for instructor-directed activities, taking notes and making connections with the learning material via the Web…the laptop is absolutely integral to all three of those things with around half the students reporting that they use them for that.

The other aspect of the smartphone that I find particularly interesting is how oftentimes they use that, as well as tablets, to make connections with other learning materials. They're sort of quick and easy devices that are easily usable; and if they need to look up something quickly or perhaps to take a photograph of something that has been posted on the wall, they can do so fairly easily there.

So, yes, they do engage in some of the non-class activities; but we have some very clear indications that students are, in fact, using these devices for their coursework. This is even punctuated further when we map out the longitudinal – well, over the last several years, the relationship between how important they view these devices to their academic success versus using them for coursework.

So on the y axis there, we have the percentage of those who rate them very to extremely important for their academic success; and on the x axis, we have the percentage of students who claim to use the device for at least one of their courses on campus. In that upper right corner, we see very clearly this idea that laptops are that workhorse of students. They see it as very to extremely important for being successful students, and they are using it in practically all of their classes.

Smartphones are on the rise a little bit there. We see a trend towards them becoming a little bit more important, and certainly students are using them more often in their courses than they have previously. The other two devices that we looked at or talked about were desktops and tablets. It's very clear there that these are in decline, both in terms of the percentage of students that are using them in their courses as well as the centrality of them to their academic success.

So I think when we take this into account, the laptop ban debate in which many of us have been engaged with over the last week-and-a-half or so…if we take into account that students are actually using these laptops and they see it as integral to their success, an outright ban strikes me, and I think Jeffrey as well, as being somewhat shortsighted in terms of hobbling students in their abilities to succeed academically.

Anything to add to this, Jeffrey, before we move on to the next?

No, you said it, I think, very clearly. Yes, it's hard to go a month without seeing an editorial in The Chronical or inside higher ed or something about somebody who wants to ban laptops in their classroom or has and is discussing it. But, like Christopher said, these are used widely and crucial for student success; so that's a piece of data that needs to be taken into consideration before a faculty member considers what their policy should be for these devices in the classroom.

Oh, thank you for pointing that out. There's –

Yeah, I noticed that someone wasn't following what I was saying about the upper right corner. It's not the upper right corner of the slide but the upper right corner of the graph. So I've highlighted it there, so hopefully that helps.

So students actually do though claim that some of their instructors are banning and discouraging the devices in class. But not all devices are treated the same in the minds of their instructors. Laptops are banned and discouraged much less frequently, as students report, than are tablets and are smartphones. Smartphones really do sort of garner the ire of instructors when it comes to having them in classrooms.

We see kind of an inverse relationship there with those for the devices in terms of the degree to which they are encouraged and required. So this is always kind of an interesting and a curious thing. The fact that we have three very powerful technologies that can do all kinds of things in terms of their computing power and the applications available to them, yet we somehow make distinctions between how we treat them in the classroom in terms of the policies and the activities that we engage in.

And it's not just students that perceive this. Faculty also claim to do very similar things, right?

Yes, so we asked both faculty and students – well, we asked faculty what their classroom policies are with regard to devices and students what their instructors' policies are; and we found the responses to be similar. Faculty have a tendency to ban smartphones or at least discourage them and say that they encourage or actually require laptops.

Actually, John O'Brien, earlier in the Chat pointed out something that is, I think, an important point, which is that the tablet and the smartphone form factor are merging a bit. You have smaller and smaller tablets and larger and larger smartphones. So the distinction between these two things is not as clear as it was a few years ago; but nevertheless, you get tablets occupying this strange kind of middle ground.

Let us move ahead to the next slide which, once again, compares the two. What you can see is that faculty say that they encourage or require devices at a higher rate than students say their instructors encourage or require devices. Students say that their instructors ban or discourage devices at a higher rate than faculty say that they do that. So there's an interesting disconnect between student perceptions and what faculty say their actual policies are, which is interesting; and it's not 100% clear why that is.

It could be that students are thinking about their more obstreperous instructors, or it could be that students are misunderstanding faculty policies. But for whatever reason, there seems to be a failure to communicate here between actual policies and what students seem to believe the policies are regarding these devices.

I think I'm of the belief that the truth probably lies somewhere in between, although I don't know leaning in which particular direction.

Let's pause for a moment and see if we have any direct questions that have popped up here for us to address. I see some folks are chatting with one another.

Oh, yeah, there's been a very active discussion going on in the Chat, which is terrific; and thank you all for that. Obviously, we don't have time to be reading this as closely as we'd like to while we're engaged in this presentation. But I personally plan on going back and rereading the Chat in full later.

Okay, so perhaps our – so who were the student population who were surveyed?

These are undergraduate students at the institutions of higher ed that participated. We had them across all four major (inaudible) class groups, and then we can go even further into that with regard to whether or not they are public or private…so we can break it out into seven that way.

With regard to breakout by online learning, I don't think we have any specific institutions that are all 100% online learning…although there are students who do learn online in this.

All right, it looks like Mike has posted a response as well.

It's everybody's favorite topic.

Yes, the excellent topic…the LMS, yes indeed.

So one of the questions we asked to faculty was what they use the LMS for; and what you see is right at the top there's this very clear distinction between the top four and the bottom four items. Again, faculty could check more than one box here; so these don't sum to 100. But most faculty, over three-quarters, use the LMS to push information out…so post a syllabus, push out information. The full question there was push out information such as handouts, et cetera, and push out and collect assignments.

Then, of course, the flip side of assignments is using the gradebook. So we have the vast majority of faculty using the LMS for these course management functions…to push out documents related to the course and deal with assignments…receiving assignments, submission, and grading them.

Then further down the list, less than 50% are using it for interactive purposes…like the discussion board. Like Christopher was just saying, we do have some students an some faculty who are teaching fully online courses; but that is certainly not the majority of our responses this year. So what faculty are using the LMS for is very straightforward course management, operational purposes by and large.

Yeah, and we also see that students are pretty much well-satisfied with the LMS functionality as well. In every single item that we have posted here about which we asked, students were pretty overwhelmingly satisfied or more of them were so with all of the items that you see here, with the exception of the bottom two, which are collaborating on projects and participating in study groups. But even then, those who are dissatisfied don't even remotely approach anywhere near half that population.

But there is a pretty clear line, as Jeffrey just noted here, between the kinds of things that they're satisfied with. So basic sorts of things…such as submitting their assignments or getting course content, checking their grades, managing their assignments, and so forth…those are the things that they're most satisfied with. So in that sense, we have the LMS relating such as campus infrastructure. It's not that different than perhaps plumbing, electricity, or telephoning. It performs these very basic functions, and people know how to do it and use it for those things.

It's the more sophisticated things that require a greater deal of thinking about pedagogy and the integration of that technology with the pedagogy that we see less satisfaction, at least relatively. So it's not that they're dissatisfied with it; but relative to the things that they are satisfied with, there are more complex activities that the LMS has as a function are the things that they are less satisfied with.

So we find similar patterns with the faculty, right?

Right, similar patterns with the faculty…the way we're presenting this figure is a little bit different. But again, the things that faculty are most satisfied with in terms of LMS functionality are the same as what they are by and large using the LMS for…these course management operational functions of posting content and receiving assignment submissions and whatnot. And only further down the list you get things like the more interactive functions…like feedback and discussions and whatnot.

Then even further down the list, you get institutional things that are not necessarily functions of the LMS but that require institutional support…such as training and integrating third-party content, things that the IT unit an centers for teaching and learning and whatnot can have a great impact on faculty satisfaction with perhaps more support, more training, that sort of thing.

Jeff, there's a really interesting question from Luke [Vanwingerdon]. What LMS received the highest satisfaction rating?

That is a very interesting question. The reason that's an interesting question is because they were completely dead equal, right? We sliced this data in several ways…by things faculty were most satisfied with, by faculty ranks, by type of institution. No matter how we sliced this data, there was not significant difference in satisfaction across LMS types…LMSs. That was a big surprise to us.

This gets back to something Christopher said a moment ago about the LMS having become infrastructural for the institution. It strikes me that the fact that it almost doesn't matter what LMS you're using, your level of satisfaction with the functionality is the same, really speaks to the deep integration of the LMS into teaching and learning…that it's just become something of a standard piece of equipment, like electricity in your classroom.

So the answer to Luke's question is all of the above, really.

I just want to give a plug here quickly because Jeffrey and I, along with Malcomb Brown from the EDUCAUSE learning industry for ELI, are just wrapping up a manuscript that is pulling some of this data

9 Educause Boulder The IT Experiences of Faculty and Students 2017 ECAR Findings out as it relates to online and blended learning into the first-ever ETRAC spinoff report on this. We're looking for that to come out sometime in Q1.

We're a little bit short on time, so go ahead.

Oh, no, do you want to take this next slide…the preferred activities?

Sure, I'm happy to.

So we looked very deeply at some qualitative responses that we have about preferred online activities on the assignments that students and faculty had. We also did this for face-to-faces as well. What we see are some interesting patterns that emerge here…that students and faculty, the number one thing in terms of the frequency with which these things are mentioned, were exams that students feel much more comfortable, much less pressured, to take exams in an online environment than they do in a face-to-face environment. It's the flexibility of when they can take it…so they can take it when they're ready and different times of day. They don't have to focus on showing up and being late and all of the stress that entails. For faculty, they see it as a way of recuperating valuable face-to-face class time. If they can do exams and quizzes online as a way of assessing students' learning, then they seem to be very pleased to do that.

We get a little bit of variation once we start going down that list from some of these things. But both students and faculty like to have homework done online. For students, it's an ease of giving instant feedback, also completing the work. For faculty, it's a matter of grading and then having discussion online as well. The asynchronous aspects, and perhaps sometimes the synchronous aspects of that, can be very beneficial of leaving a paper trail and having folks engage outside of their classroom site.

Anything else that you want to note off of this one, Jeffrey?

No, I think you've said it all for this one.

Okay, we'll pause again kind of quickly for some questions.

[Pause for questions]

Well, we have a couple of questions: How many LMSs were included in this data?

We had a list of the…what was it, Christopher…six or seven most commonly used LMSs?

I'm not sure how long it was, but I think Mike is probably responding. He's typing in there right now. He can probably tell you exactly.

Yeah, that's a reasonable question.

And in terms of the exams being conducted with the native LMS or ExamSoft, I don't know. The students and the faculty that were responding to these open-ended questions didn't really specify whether or not it was their LMS or some other plug-in there. So, unfortunately, we don't have that data.

All right, so we've got about ten minutes left or so to get through the last bit about learning environments. The first one here is I think one of Jeff's and my favorite slides, which is looking at longitudinally students' preferences for learning environments. We have data on this going back to 2013, and there are some very sort of clear trends in the mix of these.

We've complicated the structure of the possible responses over the years. So in 2014, we led from one with some online components; and we expanded that out to a Level 1 that is mostly but not completely online. Then last year, we opened it up to about half online and half face-to-face so that we'd have a better scale to work with here. But the general lines are pretty clear. We see that student preferences for courses with no online components has been steadily decreasing over the course of the last five years or

10 Educause Boulder The IT Experiences of Faculty and Students 2017 ECAR Findings so. We've seen that the preferences as well for completely online…it's kind of hard to tell there a little bit, but it's also shrinking although perhaps a little bit more slowly than those with fully online components.

But there are many students left who don't have any preferences at all. The place that it appears that all of these folks are going is in some direction of having a blended learning environment…whether it's more or less or even face-to-face and online opportunities. This, I think, is particularly heartening because it actually lines up great with what we know empirically about which of these environments is best for students to learn.

Between the 2009 Barbara Lean's DOE study that was comparing online versus face-to-face and the follow-up study that her group did in 2013, I think we have some pretty clear empirical evidence that a blending learning environment produces superior learning outcomes for students to those that are either completely online or completely face-to-face. What is particularly heartening about this is we have students developing preferences that are actually in line with what works; and that, to me, is good news in many ways.

And faculty are doing what, Jeff?

Well, and faculty…while students have sort of intuited what works for them, it seems like faculty have as well…that we don't have the same longitudinal data for faculty that we have for students, so this isn't quite as pretty a graphic, but for the 2017 findings, we find that most faculty prefer to teach in a blended environment to some extent of blendedness. That you have a fairly small percentage who prefer completely online or completely face-to-face…that what we have is both students and faculty arriving at the same position, where they prefer a blended environment for teaching and learning in…which is, again, as Christopher says, very heartening given that we have good evidence that that actually works to support student success.

Time on task is shown to increase in blended environments; and learning is a great deal about time on task, of course. Again, we have a side by side, where we simply flip the faculty graphic on its side so you can see approximately how the sectors line up.

It would be nice if we had a longer longitudinal data on the faculty, but we only have three years' worth of faculty data in total. And I'm not sure if we've asked this question in the same way; but perhaps in future iterations, we can begin to develop similar longitudinal representations of the data for faculty as well.

All right, so now this is an interesting graphic to me…particularly in light of the last one, where it showed that faculty prefer teaching in a blended environment to some extent of the blendedness. Faculty agree and strongly agree…very far to the right on this one…that online learning will make higher ed available to more students. That's fairly uncontroversial at this point; but down at the bottom, you have faculty leaning fairly heavily on the disagree side that online learning helps students learn more effectively.

So this is a very confusing finding. On the one hand, faculty prefer to teach in this environment. On the other hand, they don't believe that it helps students learn more effectively. So obviously there are perhaps some different faculty members answering these questions one way or the other; but there's a bit of double thinking happening here, and that's a little bit disturbing…particularly for institutions that, as so many are, are trying to ramp up more online courses, more online programs, and the like.

So over to Christopher.

Okay, so these are the technologies that students told us that they would like their instructors to use more or less of; and we've been asking some variation of this question for a while. It's a very long list of things, and the order of some of these don't really change that much. So for the last few years we've seen, I think, ePortfolios for example and social media being down on the bottom of the list. And I think those and maybe student tablets as learning tools are the only three where we see the percentage of students wishing the instructor used the less is actually greater than those who wished the instructors used it more.

I think for the social media thing, there's this history of this idea of the treehouse and students wanting to maintain some degree of separation between their academic work and their private lives. So I think we make the recommendation that if instructors are going to use social media in some form or fashion and require students to do it, at least give them the option of creating dummy accounts, for example, that they could use for their own work in that way.

The thing that is really interesting…when we tried to break out this data, we used factor analysis to see how these items broke out and how they hung together and to see if there were any sort of common threads. There was really sort of one major division that came to the top; and that is that the items that you see toward the top of this list are things that provide students with something. So students get something from lecture capture; they get something from free content. They get something out of the early alert systems and learning management systems and so forth.

When you go to the bottom of things, these are things that students are required to give something to in order to make it work. And probably sometimes…and here we have to kind of do this with the caveat that we don't know for certain…but I can imagine that a lot of times thins like in-class polling tools and students using their own devices or ePortfolios and so forth don't really have clear connections to the actual learning outcomes, per se. So students are feeling like these things are a burden on them, and they're not really getting that much out of them. They might not necessarily want their instructors to use them a lot more in their classes.

So it seems to be very sort of instrumental in terms of the kinds of things that students what their instructors to use more of and what they want them to use less of in this particular dynamic.

We have another slide here?

Yes, one more slide.

This is our last substantive slide; so bear with us, folks. I know we're almost at time. We asked faculty which technologies they would like to have greater skill in…if they had greater skill in using these tools, do they think it would make them more effective instructors. What we found was faculty basically said, yes, more of all of this. So again, at the highest, you've got things like multimedia production and open courseware and the like…so tools that will allow faculty to provide content to their students and a bunch of tools, such as social media and tablets, that we already have some data about are not popular with faculty.

But by and large, faculty say they would be more effective instructors if they had greater skill in using all of these tools. So again, there's an interesting dichotomy happening here with faculty liking to teach in blended environments and wanting to use these tools more, but not thinking that it's effective in increasing student success…so again, some interesting double think happening among the faculty.

So we are pretty much at time. We had another poll question in there, but we're going to go to the last slide.

Perhaps we could push the poll out, Sean, while I read the closing remarks here? We can do that and let people respond to that; that would be good…so thank you.

Sorry, but this hour has kind of disappeared here from us here. But on behalf of all of our attendees, I want to thank you all for joining us.