2008-09 Student Technology Survey Highlights

IT Services conducted our annual student technology survey for the 2008-09 academic year in January, 2009.  Information gained from this survey is very helpful for us in responding to student technology needs, and for planning future technology initiatives.

The survey provides a variety of interesting information on student use of technology including:

97% of students have their own computer at Wabash.  6% have more than one computer.

84% of student computers are laptop computers, with only 16% desktop computers.  Laptop percentage is up from 76% last year. For freshmen, 96% of computers are laptops.

98% of students own a cell phone.  Of those, 26% are iPhones, and 8% Blackberries.

98% of students check their Wabash email at least once a day.  Of those, nearly 5% have their Wabash email forwarded to another email account.  78% of students use a commercial email account in addition to their Wabash account, with Gmail the most popular commercial provider.

Despite the high computer ownership, 99% of students reported using a computer lab this year.   Primary reasons for using a computer lab includes printing (87%), accessing special software (77%), and working on group projects (64%).

97% of students used Moodle for at least one class during the fall semester (88% for three or more classes).  Most students found the transition from Blackboard to Moodle to be fairly simple, and 80% of returning students rated Moodle comparable to or superior than than Blackboard.

In addition to assessing current use of technology, we ask students to rate the priority of a number of potential new technology initiatives.  The five highest ranked items were:  provide commercial software to students for free or very low cost; increase Internet bandwidth; provide more support for student personal computers; improve disaster resistance and recovery of critical services; and improve Webmail.  For the complete list, see the pdf file linked at the bottom of this story.

Wabash students provided strong ratings across the range of technology services.  The following table shows student satisfaction (ranking of "excellent" or "good") in four primary areas.  Results for the 2007-08 survey are included for comparison:

% Excellent or Good rating, by category	2007-08	2008-09
Computer Labs	95.8%	96.8%
Web Site	95.7%	90.6%
Network Services	89.5%	90.0%
Overall Assessment	95.5%	94.3%

As we continue to more closely analyze the results of the technology survey, we will post more detailed information to the IT Services web site, including steps we’ll take to respond to needs raised in the survey.

 

For more information see:

2008-09 Student Survey Highlights (pdf)