ICT in Higher Education: what do prospective students want and expect?

Source: JISC MORI report, published September 2007

"Fundamentally, this age group suspects that if all learning is mediated through technology, this will diminish the value of the learning."

During June 2007 the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) commissioned Ipsos MORI to undertake research among prospective university students to understand:

• current levels of ICT provision at school/college
• expectations of ICT provision at university
• differences between expectation of ICT provision and that which is provided by HE institutions.

The study forms part of a bigger piece of research being undertaken by JISC to better understand student expectations of ICT provision.

This is a "must read" report, produced by researchers without an ICT axe to grind, which provides a wide range of current insights into how university-bound late teenagers in a developed country view, think about and use (and not...) ICT.

The full 40 page report is available on the JISC web site as a 1 MB PDF.

Comments

[Mark van Harmelen]

I will look at the report later, but for now I wonder if one result (the last in the graphic in the FM post) would have been different if the question had been
'take part in an online community, for example Facebook or MySpace'
rather than
'... a "virtual world" such as SecondLife'.

If someone doesn't know what an online community is, then the use of SecondLife as an example may bias that person's answer. I claim that there are many users of social networking services who will not know what an online community is.

Comment from Seb. Mark, yes, I am sure the result would have been different. Though it is debatable the extent to which most participants in Facebook or Myspace participate in either as "participants in a community".