Our team, with the help of our graduate assistants Michael Schneider and Matara Hitchcock, is well underway analyzing and preparing visualizations from ASSETT’s 2021 Academic Technology survey. We received responses from 1,006 undergraduates for the student version of the survey (for a 18.7% response rate), and 1,176 responses for the faculty version of the survey (for a 30.4% response rate).
Although analysis is ongoing, we’ve already found a few interesting preliminary results. One such example has to do with faculty and student preferences for various course delivery formats. Unsurprisingly, there was a strong preference for in-person classes, with 93% of faculty and 88% of students indicating they preferred these formats. One such example (see Figure 1 below) has to do with faculty and student preferences for various course delivery formats. Unsurprisingly, there was a strong preference for in-person classes, with 93% of faculty and 88% of students indicating they preferred these formats. However, both groups also indicated stronger preferences for fully remote classes (defined as meeting remotely and synchronously at scheduled dates and times) than for hybrid in-person classes (defined as a combination of in-person instruction with periods of remote and/or online learning). This finding tells us that both faculty and students were averse to the COVID-19-induced mid-semester transitions between in-person and remote learning, and a majority would have preferred to stay in one format or the other for the duration of the semester.
Figure 1: Faculty and student preferences for various course modalities, as defined by the CU Registrar’s office. Larger green bars indicate course types that are more preferred among respondents, and larger orange bars indicate course types that are less preferred among respondents.
We’ll be sure to share all of the results with you as soon as they’re ready later this spring. In the meantime, results from the 2018 iteration of the Academic Technology survey can be viewed here: https://www.colorado.edu/assett/about/assessment-reports
