Great Expectations of ICT: How Higher Education Institutions are Measuring Up

According to a recently completed study of United Kingdom (UK) first-year university students, students are starting to mix their social networking sites with their academic studies and inviting tutors and lecturers into their virtual space. Commissioned by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and carried out by Ipsos MORI, a UK marketing and research firm, the research builds on a previous study called "Student Expectations" asking secondary school students to indicate their expectations of technology provision when entering into higher education. The new study compares answers of the students in their first year of higher education, with those of the original study.

From the JISC website:

Key findings show that:

• General use of social networking sites is still high (91% use them regularly or sometimes). Frequency of use has increased now that they are at university with a higher proportion claiming to be regular users than when they were in secondary school.
• 73% use social networking sites to discuss coursework with others - more than a quarter of them on at least a weekly basis.
• These sites are described as useful in enhancing their learning.
• Attitudes towards whether lecturers or tutors should use social networking sites for teaching purposes are mixed, with 38% thinking it a good idea and 28% not. Evidence shows that using these sites in education are more effective when the students set them up themselves; lecturer-led ones can feel overly formal.
  
• Despite students being able to recognise the value of using these sites in learning, only a quarter of the students feel they are encouraged to use Web 2.0 features (a term which describes the trend in the use of internet technology that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and collaboration among users) by tutors or lecturers.
  
• Three-quarters of students are able to use their own computer on all of their university’s systems.

While research found a need for further information and communication technology (ICT)-related guidance and instruction among a small proportion of students, it found that there is also a need to help students understand best practice for validating their work taken from the internet. As stated here, the Google Generation report, commissioned by JISC and the British Library, published in January 2008, explains that students ‘do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web’.