Are students ready to e-learn? assessing students' IT Literacy
skills
Gabriel Hanganu
Stuart Lee
Learning Technologies Group
University of Oxford
E-learning at Oxford
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‘adds real value’ Revised Teaching and
Learning Strategy 2002-05
‘the IT competence expected of students for a
particular course (undergraduate and
postgraduate), should wherever appropriate
be defined … that tutors, with appropriate support,
provide their students with guidance on how to
acquire the necessary levels of IT competence
needed for their course’
Report on IT in T&L (2002)
Ozga and Sukhnandan (1997); Earwaker
(1992) - outdated roles of tutors?
IT Literacy - 3 Methods
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1) Online diagnostic tests of basic computer
literacy (15 available)
2) IT Training (including ECDL)
3) ‘Survey of IT Skills’
Survey aimed to assess IT skills and
expectations about e-learning
Aim to produce a series of recommendations
re IT literacy
Driven by the Institutional Audit
Preliminary Information
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Research into previous studies
Constructed 4 questionnaires (paper
and online) - 1st UG, final UG, 1st PG,
finishing PG (max. 10,000 FTE)
Targeted departments (one from each
division and 2 colleges), plus open call
Sponsorship > Apple iPod for UG; PDA
for PG
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Questionnaires MT03
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Perception of students’ IT Literacy skills
Previous involvement with e-learning
Context of IT use
Expectations about Univ/ College IT provision
Perceptions of IT importance in future employment
IT use in relation to tutorial teaching
Focus groups/ individual interviews HT04
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Follow-up points addressed in questionnaires
5 departments (1 in each division) + 1 college
2 f.g. for each unit (UG/PG) + phone interviews
Other projects
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CITSCAPES (survey of all UK HE institutions
on C&IT induction)
Big Blue (current practice in Information Skills
Training for students in Higher & post-16 Ed)
Durham U (audit of C&IT skills of staff and
students + annual survey of first years)
Edinburgh U (biennial undergraduate IT
literacy survey)
JUSTEIS (general survey of electronic
information services and their end users)
Key points - student evaluation
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lifelong learning in the background
importance of social context of T&L
part of on-going research process
feed back educational policymakers and
teachers and learners themselves
both quantitative and qualitative
beyond perception
Oxford particularities
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collegiate structure > different sets of
questionnaires for UGs and PGs
tutorial system > in-depth interviews to qualify
general assumption that IT obstructs interpersonal exchange between tutor and learner
previous Oxford-based studies (e.g. IAUL’s
‘UG students’ experience of learning at
Oxford’)
Questionnaires
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1415 (932 UG, 483 PG) out of approx 10.000
students from all divisions (all bar 4 depts.)
44 out of 46 colleges and halls
can’t generalise for whole divisions, or all
colleges; however student sample significant
enough to draw some conclusions
experience with this pilot will help planning
future evaluation strategy
Checking students' perception
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IT self-tests (word processing)
students who thought they could use
Word without help scored over 35/40
future: check perception of all IT skills +
real-life IT tasks adapted to OU learning
context
IT skills - follow-up interviews
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Ways of improving students’ IT skills
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UGs: very little time left beyond exams
concern > curriculum embedded?
PGs: want to decide for themselves > IT
skills tailored to their specific needs
Student quote 1
“Developing IT skills has been stressful for me because IT
skills don’t seem to have as much value as other skills like
thinking and struggling with the problems of my research. It
does give me stress—I don’t have time to spend on these
courses here, and I don’t think of the long-term, where it might
actually help. So having some kind of guide or statement from
the authorities saying this is how you should spend you time
as a student-- that would help to give IT that sort of equal
value so you can invest the time in it as part of your
professional path. And then you won’t feel guilty about
spending time on it! I think people want to develop their IT
skills but they are under a lot of stress and deadlines and
demands—investing for the long term is hard because IT is a
gradual process with a long-term commitment.”
IT use in tutorial teaching
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in preparation for tutorial/ during tutorial
gap between expectations and actual
experience:
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in preparation for tutorial: PGs used IT
more than they expected
during tutorial: both UGs and PGs used IT
less than they expected
Student quote 2
“There is a difference between the tutorial time itself and the
preparation for the tutorial, and I think the basic assumption
behind the tutorial is that you come prepared and your tutor
comes prepared and you discuss what you have already seen
and read and thought about compared to other things. And I
think that looking at data or articles or anything during that time
will take a lot of time and won’t be efficient in terms of the
discussion, and it will fragment it. On the other hand if you are
preparing for a tutorial and the tutor says ‘hey take a look at this
website’, I think it is really helpful. Maybe you can look at that
website during the tutorial if it’s relevant to the discussion, but
that’s as much as I can think of.”
Student quote 3
“Tutorial? I just hand something in and discuss it with my
supervisor. Occasionally he’ll have his laptop and look up
something on a search online, which is quite useful. In my own
teaching I think it would be quite useful to do the same but we
tend to get stuck in these dingy little rooms with no access to a
computer so I can’t really. But it would be useful if I was
demonstrating online databases, websites or search engines.
You sort of tell the students about them, and they go ‘hmmm’,
but you know they aren’t going to go look it up. But if you could
do it in front of them, that would be very useful. If they have a
query, they could practice researching how to look up a question
and that would be really good for them.”
IT in tutorials - interviews
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students want to preserve one to one
interaction
IT seen as potentially altering personal
exchange between tutor and student
only when discussed in general terms
Conclusions
 students' perception of their IT skills is good
(yet curiosity about web authoring skills)
 students' expectations about IT provision
Oxford are being met
 different UG and PG learning contexts affect
students’ perception and use of e-learning
 students want to keep one to one interaction
with tutors; when properly used IT is not seen
as fundamentally opposed to tutorial teaching
Links
LTG website
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/
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Online survey
IT Literacy self-tests
Student evaluation projects