A quick glance at the first draft of the fall 2006 Faculty Advisory Committee on Academic Computing (FACAC) student survey will find what many would expect — students love their laptops, iPods, and cellphones. However, taking a longer look shows interesting trends that could have major impacts on how educational technology is used at Penn State.
There were several trends in the survey that are highly interesting, said John Harwood, senior director of Teaching and Learning with Technologies, a unit of Information Technology Services. "I was struck by the sharp spike in laptop ownership rate." Harwood said. "This year, 70 percent of all students have a laptop, and I predict next year this number will be 80 percent. This is consistent with national trends."
Harwood also noted there are technologies that are very popular with students, but others that are clearly not. For example, while 50 percent own an iPod and 25 percent own some other type of portable MP3 player, only 7.8 percent own a personal digital assistant (PDA) such as a Palm device and just 2 percent own a "smart phone" (such as a Blackberry) that combines functions of a cell phone and a PDA.
The survey also shows a small percentage of students taking advantage of podcasting — just 2.4 percent reported using podcasts in their courses and 11.8 percent listen to them outside of coursework. However, Harwood said, the relatively small percentage of students currently using podcasting for formal instruction is expected to change dramatically thanks to the Podcasts at Penn State program, currently in the pilot stage. The program involves fitting some classrooms with podcasting-related equipment such as microphones and installing software, along with working with faculty and faculty support staff to develop best practices for educational podcasts and incorporating them into courses.
One form of communication that students definitely are using right now is text messaging. The survey found that 82 percent of students use text messaging because they think it is a useful way to communicate not just in classes, but also with friends, family, etc. Harwood notes that this complements what students are doing in social Internet sites such as Facebook and Myspace. "This is a student phenomenon and not necessarily how faculty and staff want to communicate," he said. "But as a student-centered university, we want to be very mindful of student preferences and habits and how we can take advantage of it for education."
The results also uncovered a few challenges. Penn State has put a lot of investment into wireless access at each campus, Harwood said, something that should be useful to the 70 percent of students who own a laptop. However, students do not seem to be taking advantage of this resource. "Students report a fairly small percentage bring their laptops to class to take notes, interact with faculty, and do other things," he said.
Harwood believes there are several reasons for this. He notes that older classrooms offer logistic challenges to laptop use, as the desks are not designed with laptops in mind and there is a lack of outlets to charge laptop batteries that often only have a power life of a few hours. In the FACAC survey draft, over a third of students said their laptops were too heavy to bring to class.
"I hope to see more laptop use in the classroom, as it can be a very effective tool to improve learning," Harwood said. "Perhaps the computers need to become smaller, maybe the battery life needs to improve, maybe we need to provide more outlets in our buildings. Right now, the students have a very powerful, very networked kind of resource in our wireless capabilities, and I would love to see it used more."
Harwood also noted that academic integrity surfaced in the survey as an issue. "I am not surprised at the fairly high percentage of students who have cheated on a test at least once," he said. "Penn State is not at all unusual in this regard."
One way to combat cheating is the use of Turnitin, a Web-based plagiarism detection and prevention system. Turnitin can be used as a means to teach students how to work with sources and to raise awareness of paraphrasing and quoting skills in order to avoid plagiarism. Harwood said a report was recently given at a Faculty Senate meeting about how faculty are using Turnitin with great success.
While much of the survey's data is helpful, Harwood cautioned about taking some of the results too literally. For example, while more than 84 percent of all students rated their computer expertise as intermediate or better, Harwood believes that students may be overestimating their skills. ÒI know anecdotally from faculty that there are lots of students who, for example, are asked to use applications like Excel to produce simple graphs of data but don't know how to do that," he said.
"I would say our students are adept at using e-mail and can send and receive e-mail attachments, along with being able to navigate around Google applications and ANGEL," Harwood said. "But if you probe deeply and ask about multimedia creation or ask them to develop a personal Web page using Dreamweaver, FrontPage, or some other Web editor, you will find that most students do not have those skills."
Harwood said the final survey results will be released later in the spring semester, and will be able to be viewed at http://tlt.its.psu.edu/pages/surveys.html. This site has other survey results of interest, including past FACAC student surveys.
"Lots of people at Penn State make use of this survey and we hope that it is helpful," Harwood said. "I look forward to planning our survey for next year. There will certainly be new kinds of questions because the world we are living in is always changing."