Findings from the USQ Student’s’ Experiences and Expectations of Technologies Survey 2012

The Students’ Experiences and Expectations of Technology Survey (SEETS) was designed to provide USQ with an understanding of how its students are currently using the technologies they have access to in support of their learning and how they might like (intend) to use them in the future. It also investigated the differences between their use of technologies for academic purposes compared to their use in everyday life. This survey was originally used by three universities in Sydney in 2010; Macquarie, UTS and UWS (Gosper, Malfroy, McKenzie & Rankine 2011), and was broadly based on both the ECAR Survey, originally developed by EDUCAUSE (ECAR, 2008) and the Great Expectations of IT Survey (JISC, 2008) from the United Kingdom. Since its original use in 2010 some of the terminology was updated to reflect the use of more recent popular online tools and trends. To help determine which tools should be included in the survey reference was made to the work of The Horizon Project, a project of the New Media Consortium (http://www.nmc.org/horizon). This project regularly highlights the technologies likely to impact on teaching and learning in universities for the foreseeable future. However, it was also recognized that not all students, and in this case USQ students, have access to, or use the latest technologies (Kennedy, et al., 2008), it was therefore important to ensure the survey also covered the use of more traditional technologies (email, SMS, mobile phones), together with the more recent cloud based technologies.