The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2009, published by the every year since 2004 by the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, and surveying US undergraduate students in a range of institution types, focused this year on mobile technologies on campus.

It’s worth noting at the outset that the basic technologies continue to be used in coursework. Students are overwhelmingly positive about VLEs but want greater consistency in use and availability. The library website is used by 94.6% of respondents with a median frequency of weekly. Presentation software is used by 93.8% and spreadsheets by 86.8%. All of this is grist to the mill for James Clay and those who agree with him that the time is not yet right for the wholesale abandonment of the VLE – see my previous posting The VLE is dead – or is it? And note that this debate is being replayed at University of Wolverhampton in December. However, only 45% believe that the majority of their lecturers used ICT effectively in their courses. This last finding was consistent across student demographics and institution types. And only 52.6% find that institutional IT services are always available when students need them for their coursework. So the status quo isn’t without its difficulties.

Students perceive more benefit from IT in terms of convenience (70.4%) than enhancement of the learning experience (49.4%).

51.2% of respondents now own an Internet –capable handheld device. 11.8% planned to purchase one in the next 12 months. But a third of those who own such devices never use the Internet from their device. And even in today’s adverse economic conditions, 79% of first year students own a laptop that is one year old or less.

As for the use of mobile technologies, the most common use of the Internet from handheld devices was news, weather, sport and specific facts. One finding that may well confirm the suspicions of lecturers is that 32.2% regularly use a mobile device in class for non-course activities. Maybe more interestingly, older students were more likely to perceive this as distracting than were younger students. Handheld device users accessing the Internet on a daily basis are more likely to be technology early adopters or innovators than those reporting less frequent use.

The gap between younger and older students in terms of social networking use is shrinking. But despite overall very high levels of adoption and usage, only 27.8% were incorporating them into their course studies at the time the survey was being carried out. Wikis are only used by 25.3% of respondents in course activities. Other technologies surveyed for use in courses were blogs (11.5%), podcasts (5.8%), video creation software (6.0%) and audio creation software – 5.0%.

There are encouraging findings on content creation and sharing:
- 44.8% of respondents contribute content to video websites
- 41.9% of respondents contribute content to wikis
- 37.3% of respondents contribute to blogs

Irrespective of the growth of mobile technologies, respondents consistently articulated the desire to see the use of IT blended with human interaction in the academic environment. So students want a “moderate” amount of technology in their courses.