LEAD Faculty Survey Results

 
In September, as part of its ongoing effort to identify the computing abilities and needs of UC Davis faculty and staff, the Learning Environment Architecture Development (LEAD) team, in collaboration with the Teaching Resources Center, collected hundreds of surveys. The results of these surveys are helping to shape the LEAD team's recommendations for establishing a distributed learning network at UC Davis. Here, we highlight some of the main results. Total number surveyed: 1,295 UC Davis faculty (sample size: 650)

• Faculty are generally using at least one computer for instruction-related tasks. Only 6% reported never using a computer for instruction.
• Faculty are very mobile workers. They conduct their work from multiple locations using different machines (50% use laptops, with 30% using them in the classroom).
• At least 90% do some of their instruction-related computing tasks off campus.
• Faculty use a wide variety of computers and operating systems (62 % use Windows, 48% use Macs, 18% use both, and 15% use UNIX-based machines).
• 65% use a course Web page or plan to do so.
• Over half suggest their students use email, and 36% require students to use it as a regular part of their courses.
• Over half use Melvyl® as an instructional tool.
• Two-thirds rated technology as important to access information in their discipline.
• Almost half (46%) rated technology as important to improving pedagogy.

Full survey results are available on the Web at http://lead.ucdavis.edu/.