JISC recent published the Digital Experience Insights Survey 2019, which is well worth a read through of the findings for HE in particular. It takes 3,485 responses of both HE staff and students from 26 different Universities and so probably represents the best contemporary snapshot of the HE Digital Education Landscape. I don’t want to replicate the reading of this document in this Blog post, but I thought I’d instead pluck out a few figures which I think are worth highlighting and disseminating further.
From my own point of view the amount of staff engaged in digital teaching activities is quite insightful. 62% of HE staff say they would like to be using digital technologies used more in their teaching practice, yet only 11% say they use live quizzing or polling in their teaching practice and only 24% say they’ve been involved in creating digital learning materials for their students in their teaching practice. Far from being disheartening, I would hope these findings would give many lecturers who are involved in those activities both a sense of perspective as to the fact that they are doing more than most. To those who aren’t currently involved in those digital teaching practices I think it also gives a strong message that many are also at starting points on a digital journey.
Classically the main barrier to integrating more digital teaching practices into the classroom is time. This is pretty much confirmed across the sector with only 13% of HE staff agreeing that they feel they feel that have the “headspace” or time to do so. Clearly this figure strongly contrasts with the 62% of staff who say they’d like to do so, and gives perhaps some support for the idea of specifically allocating time for digital development of teaching materials into staff workloads.
Personally I find some of the student responses some of the most interesting to read as well. Given what I’ve already discussed for example it’s quite interesting that on a course/modular level 75% of students rated the digital teaching and learning they were receiving (p.61) as good (45%), excellent (27%) or the best imaginable (3%). Clearly despite the frustrations that staff have over time, what is being produced is, on average, of good quality.
But what do students want, what perhaps is of the most impact to students, and which digital education resources do HE students regard as the most useful to them? That’s sometimes the biggest quandary for lecturers about where to invest their time into digital teaching development, and p.63 of the report helpfully gives some decent insights. HE Students rank as most useful; practice questions to be available online (35%), course related videos (23%), readings and references (20%) and interactive polls and quizzes in-class (15%). This is both useful and perhaps needs a bit of dissection at the same time. I’m not surprised for example by the low ranking of in-class digital interactivity for example given only 11% of HE teaching staff are responding that they do it. At FE level in contrast for example, where the lecturer usage of interactive polls and quizzes in-class is much higher, the FE students rank in-class interactivity as by far the most useful useful and desired digital education approach. Could this be a case of the HE students simply not knowing what they’re missing? Or an indication of a serious divergence in what HE students find the most useful from FE?
Useful data then, but not necessarily to be taken “as read”.