I've been looking over the 2009 FACAC Student Survey results and have some thoughts I'd like to capture.
The first thing I notice is how our new services are catching on -- and quickly. If you look at the services students report using, the top ones are ANGEL, eLion, Portal, and Wireless. All of these are things I expected to be at the top of the list. What I was surprised about is how services like ePortfolio (16%), Blogs (10%), Podcasting (7%), and Digital Commons (6%) are being used. Sort of amazing to me as these had very low utilization in the last survey two years ago. Even the Educational Gaming Commons checked in at nearly 2%.
One area we are really lagging in is mobile access. We've not addressed the intense rise in ownership of web enabled mobile devices -- Blackberries and iPhones represent about 20% of that space. We need to be thinking more strategically about how we address these devices.
Facebook continues to be a highly used social network and I think we'll be finally taking another stab at using it for access to services. What is encouraging is that students are embracing Twitter (16%) and Youtube in a big way. These things offer new opportunities for engagement in and out of the classroom and it gives us a leg to stand on when talking to faculty.
Speaking of social networking, 82% report being active on FB. 68% use it to share photos. 16% upload and share videos on Youtube. 14% have an online photo account, although we don't with whom.
Laptop ownership continues to be strong, with 83% of students saying they own one. How do we work to make it more attractive for faculty to take advantage of these devices in their classes? I am guessing some serious thinking about how blogs, youtube, and twitter can be used inside the classroom would help. I am hoping we can split some numbers out with regard to how they use these laptops -- we have facebook and twitter use lumped together and no matter how much I begged we may not have asked these as separate items. It is really important to not lump the social networks together because they each offer such radically different opportunities. At any rate, 80% of laptop owners say they use them to access FB/Twitter. 53% of laptop owners report playing games on them. Three other items here that is good to see, but are also huge opportunities are that 24% say they edit video on them, 23% take notes, and 14% blog. Huge opportunities here!
I was stunned that 63% of our students own a digital camera that isn't in a cell phone. That is a huge number as far as I am concerned. I was also surprised that 58% claim owning a palm sized digital video camera ... perhaps many of them are counting their digital cameras with video capabilities, but I was surprised to see that.
So those are some rapid fire thoughts ... not much analysis here, but some things that jumped out at me.
