Learning Landscape

Grainne Conole, our Cluster Critical Friend has written an admirable report on the day’s activities here: http://e4innovation.com/?p=117

A summary report of a survey on student use of Information & Communications Technologies has been submitted to the Project Steering Committee.  The survey was conducted as part of the Pathfinder Learning Landscape Project in Easter Term, 2007.  1923 students responded, from across a wide range of disciplines and all colleges (roughly 11% of the current student population).

Respondents were asked about the frequency, confidence and usefulness of 12 techniques and technologies. Email is clearly the “killer application”, with 99.4% of respondents using it at least once a day, compared with 95.2% using face-to-face communication.  Bibliographic tools (6.4%) and electronic journals (21.8%) were the least frequently used, and were also the technologies that students were least confident about using.  Despite this, at least 60% of students thought electronic journals were useful for several tasks, including writing essays, searching for publications, reading articles, researching a difficult idea, or working on a dissertation.

92.7% of students found email useful for raising an issue with their supervisor, compared with 85.8% who found face-to-face communication useful for this task.  85.8% of students found non-academic sites such as Google and Wikipedia useful in researching a difficult idea.

Matthew Riddle, Research Associate, Learning Landscape Project