Alex Little

A few weeks ago I prepared a survey to find out about students access to computers, their computing skills and what they’d like to see from an online learning system. Due to the (five week!) inter-semester break, I only managed to have these handed out to lecturers to distribute to students last week. In order to increase the completion rate I asked lecturers to hand them out at the end of a class, and get students to complete it there and then.

Today I had the first set of completed surveys returned, other lecturers are going to hand it out next week as apparently not many students turn up during the first week! From the approx 90 second year students, 60 surveys were returned – I reckon that’s quite a good rate of return.

So had quite a fascinating couple of hours this afternoon reading through (and typing up) the responses. I was really pleased how comprehensive the responses were and the fact that almost all students had something to say in the comment sections. However, I am beginning to wonder now just how much data I’m going to end up with to sort through as I still have surveys from another 3 cohorts of computer science students to be returned. I’ve also been thinking about giving a similar survey out to non-computer science students to compare their answers.

Without trying to preempt (although maybe I am!) the final results and analysis of the survey, three things really stood out to me on a quick reading of those already returned:

1. very few students (maybe less than 10%) have access to a computer outside the department, this includes using internet cafes.
2. many students complain about lack of access to the computer labs.
3. students aren’t happy with the number of working PCs available in the labs when the labs are actually open.

Probably no great surprises there, as it’s pretty much what I expected, but will be interesting to see if this is confirmed once all the surveys are returned. I should be able to get a good report written up with all the results.