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2013 Faculty Technology Survey Results!

ByJennifer Stevens Hours

In the spring of 2013, ITG asked the faculty what they thought about educational technology at Emerson. A good mix of full time (46%) and part-time (54%) faculty from all departments responded.

The most interesting question to us was “What do you think of Canvas so far? What is easy, and what is confusing?” 74% of responses had feedback on specific features: organizing content (21%), assignments (19%), grading (19%), and the gradebook (17%).

We also categorized the responses as mostly positive or mostly negative:

69% had positive comments about Canvas, with only 5 negative comments

…and positive won by a landslide!

Sample comments:

AMAZING. It's easy to post, email, receive work. Discussions are a bit confusing (though I haven't played around with it as much), student view seems less intuitive for certain things like submitting assignments and peer review. I think this just calls for extra clarity in instructions from the professor.

Canvas was easy and I thought a much better experience than when I used to use Blackboard. My students didn't have many issues, either.

Canvas is great! It helps me and students keep organized and tracks important information, such as assignment due dates and upcoming events. As far as improvements go, I think the icon/link that lets students see the annotated version of their drafts needs to be larger and prominent.

Nothing is easy. Its really not intuitive. There is an unavoidable, perhaps, learning curve. It will take a few cycles to fully utilize.

I absolutely love Canvas so far. It serves as a single space for all of my class needs--from grading to assignments to syllabus to peer reviews. It's been fantastic. I love the Speedgrading feature along with the rubric function; it's made grading so much easier. I also love that the peer review feature allows for comments and replies to comments directly in the draft. Having all of that information (including attachments) directly in Canvas has been very helpful. Using Canvas has allowed me to go paperless for the first time.

More results:

Most respondents said they use Canvas, and they use it mostly to distribute content and for other administrative tasks like receiving assignments and grading.
68 responded: 67% did, 32% did not.

Of those who didn’t use Canvas, the biggest barrier was the lack of time to learn it. Other frequently used technology tools are Powerpoint and Google Docs.

Faculty members’ main goals when using technology are to distribute course content (87%), save time in managing courses (76%), and provide supplementary materials to students (76%).

In general, faculty are comfortable using technology:

0 answered not comfortable, 16% somewhat comfortable, 42% confortable, and 42% very comfortable

What hinders them from using it is the time required to use it in the classroom (34%) and lack of technical skill (32%).

Faculty generally learn about technology from a staffer or by experimenting on their own:

77% from a technology support staffer, 76% on own by experimenting, 46% on their own by reading support documents, and 35% from a colleague

When asked “Is there anything else we should know?”, the responses were categorized as follows:

46% of answers were categorized as love, 42% uncategorized, and 10% of faculty said they had no time to learn technology

Sample comments:

You guys are awesome. Great support, quick response, very knowledgeable. The office makes instructors feel welcome:)

The College IT/media learning support is good. The problem is finding the time to update skills in these areas.

We adore you too!

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