Education Building

Each year, Educause publishes the Undergraduate Students and Information Technology survey. It’s an interesting glimpse into the student world – as we age, our remembrance of our undergraduate years change, and it’s easy to start making assumptions about how current undergraduates interact with and define information technologies.

In thier introduction, it explains: “Since 2004, the ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology has sought to shed light on how technology affects the college experience. We ask students about the technology they own and how they use it in and out of their academic world. We also ask students about how skilled they believe they are with technologies; how they feel technology is affecting their learning experience; and their preferences for information technology (IT) in courses. Our ultimate goal is to provide college and university administrators, particularly those charged with implementing the  technology environments in which these students will learn and grow, with reliable information on undergraduates’ behaviors, preferences, and overall satisfaction with technology.”

Read the key findings or the full report: were the results what you expected? what else would you have asked? how would you answer these questions? how could this impact your own teaching or learning styles? what other studies or comparisons are useful?

IN the United Kingdom, there are some interesting centralized projects that support teaching and learning in higher education.

I came across a blog posting the other day that highlights an OER (Open Educational Repository), and that highlights two particularly good resources.

The first is a series of 10 mini-episodes to follow group work: it’s success’ and difficulties.  Group work is a popular form of assessment and evaluation at the university, but what kind of support do we provide to understand and support the group formation process? Do our instructions to students focus on the content, and not the group process?

Intriguingly, there is also a reading skills tutorial, with self-assessments and quizzes to help student identify their skill level, and where they could use more help. Faculty and instructors have commented to me in the past that they find their students’ writing skills to be insufficient. At SFU we have some great resources through the Learning Commons – this link is simply another tool.