A team of collaborators led by Alan Wolf, University of Wisconsin and Flora McMartin that included Glenda Morgan, Cathy Manduca, Joshua Morrill, and Ellen Iverson surveyed 4,678 faculty members from 115 two, four, and gradutate level colleges and universities during the Fall of 2005 to find out how they used or did not use digital resources in instruction and learning. A majority—42% of survey participants—used digital images in lectures. Other types of digital resources such as animations, data sets, learning objects and scholarly resources were used in preparing for classes, but less often in direct instruction.

In pre-survey focus groups many participants had very diverse notions of what digital libraries are, and did not know about significant national efforts like NSDL and OCW.

Most faculty (86%) feel as if they are “self taught” when it comes to how they learned about incorporating technology into teaching. Faculty development programs were also credited for helping them learn to use digital resources in instruction. The biggest barrier to using technology included concern about needing “more time,” having access to useful resources, and better training. The audience, many of whom were digital resource managers, were interested in teasing out deeper meaning around “time” issues–were respondants saying that resources or technology were hard to use or “not quite right” thereby wasting faculty time, or were other issues around time management in play? Flora McMartin commented, “Google is both an enabler and a disabler,” because it gets faculty to resources quickly, but sometimes does not get them to the “right” resources thereby discouraging them from looking more deeply into how to find and utilize online resources.

The majority of respondents (approximately 60%) believed that digital resources were of great value to their instruction, and fewer than 2% find online digital resources to have no value to instruction. 42% felt that content should be peer reviewed and of high quality and that it should be organized to find quickly. 12% thought that digital resources should be supplemented to explain how to use them in teaching.

One audience participant asked, “How much background information were you taking from the survey takers?” Her hypothesis is that the more engaged a professor is in their communities of practice, the more they might make use of certain types of online information. This type of adjunct information would enlarge the understanding of survey data.

Take Aways

• Faculty are more alike than different in use of online digital materials

• No direct relationship between highly valuing educational digital resources and level of use

• Faculty prefer search for finding materials

• Barriers to use cannot be simply described

• Learning about teaching is not (yet?) a Web acitvity

Some audience members felt that “learning about teaching online” varied greatly from discipline to discipline.

Next Stage

Josh Merrill, Merrill Solutions Research, Ellen Iverson, Carleton College, and Carrie Ouradnick, University of Wisconsin–Madison will use survey information to develop a tool for digital resource managers to evaluate their own users in collaboration with selected NSDL Pathways Projects.

For more information: http://serc.carleton.edu/facultypart