Survey of the digital lives of professors

Allen, I.E. and Seaman, J. (2012) Digital Faculty: Professors, Teaching and Technology 2012  Inside Higher Ed, Babson Survey Research Group and Quahog Research Group, LLC.

Kolowich, S. (2012) Digital Faculty: Professors and Technology 2012, Inside Higher Education, August 24

This is a report of a survey of 4,564 faculty members, composing a nationally representative sample spanning various types of institutions; and 591 administrators who are responsible for academic technology at their institutions. An earlier report focused on faculty views of online education. This survey focuses on how digital technology is affecting the lives of faculty in more general terms. The Kolowich article is a fairly extensive summary of the report.

The report suggests that in general, faculty are fairly positive towards many of the digital developments in academia, such as ‘flipped’ classrooms which allow for more in-class discussion, and the growth of learning analytics (although not described as such in this report). There was also general support for the move towards e-publishing and e-textbooks.

One finding that struck me is that administrators consistently over-estimate faculty engagement with digital technologies such as an LMS.

Another finding that struck me is how relatively few e-mails faculty received from students, even when teaching online courses – rarely more than 25 a day.

There’s a lot of data in the original report and it is worth reading in full.