Assessing Learning and Scholarly Technologies: Lessons from an Institutional Survey

Writing in EDUCAUSE Quarterly, Cara Lane and Greg Yamashiro describe the methodology, results, and lessons-learned of a large-scale survey of a variety of constituents on the University of Washington campus regarding technology needs, attitudes, and adoption:

The UW survey findings represent just one component of what we learned, however. We also discovered the opportunities and challenges inherent in conducting large-scale, committee-based research. We believe the circumstances we encountered during the survey process resemble those other institutions have faced or will face in similar endeavors, and in this article we share the lessons learned. While some of these lessons include research findings, the majority involve the implications of the methodologies selected and the decisions made.

We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches we used to determine the focus of our survey, to define technology within the survey, and to select a sample of the UW population. We conclude with a description of how we applied what we learned to the development of our 2008 Faculty, Teaching Assistant, and Student Surveys on Learning and Scholarly Technologies, which, at the time of this writing, are being distributed to the UW community.