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11.07.2002
Helmut Fritsch

Results of a survey on the use of WWW in the FernUniversität

Whenever such a new system is suggested by an institution as becoming one of the main elements of the educational system, it will be confronted with the needs, expectations and competencies of teaching staff. So we made a survey which also is relevant for the project "web-edu". We asked the complete teaching staff of our university ( professors and lecturers alike) to fill in the questionnaire on using the WWW for educational purposes. In order to increase accessibility and the motivation to fill in the questionnaire we developed a java-based answer scheme which allows the presentation of questionnaire results online instantly after having filled in the questionnaire. Half of the respondents decided to fill it in this way, the other half decided to fill it in the traditional way of an HTML questionnaire. Some of the results are alo presented online. Inclination to answer this questionnaire has been surprisingly different compared to the number of staff of the subjects taught: Whereas our faculty of economics is the second largest in number we only find some 11% of respondents answering belonging to that field. It certainly is the advantage of neighbourhood to own interests that most anwers come from the faculty of information sciences ( 34%). But that 34% of answering staff members teach in liberal arts subjects is surprisingly good because there always has been the rumor that faculty of liberal arts have a strong tendency to object against such new media.
The return rate of this questionnaire is about 30% of FernUniversität staff. By no means the results can be called strictly representative. Some tendencies, though are worth being commented upon.
The main use of WWW is using it as a source for ones own information. And 87% see the www as a supplement to other forms of teaching. As one of the main media for teaching we find only 13% of the respondents. And even less (8%) state that they use is for tests or examinations. This is insofar an interesting figure because in mid 2002 the fivehundredth video-conference examination was held.
Although users of www are normally well aware of copyright issues only less than 5% ask always for permission before they put a link to someone elses page. More than 55% will never ask for permission and state this explicitly. So the situation - legally there still is an open situation in Germany - can be put as follows: If teachers in university are forced to ask for permission before they put a link to somebody else's page in their text, they will refrain from doing so and rather "quote" the page than directing readers directly to the quoted page.
One of the interesting questions for us was the ease with which university teachers stick to their systems or whether they test a page before publishing it e.g. in terms of compatibility with normal other browsers: Only 8% admit that they do not test the pages with anything else but their own system.
Accessibility questions are of relevance to only 27% of the answering staff.
Who does it? This had been one of the crucial questions in this survey: Is it the professor himself who "puts up" the new page or is it done by someone else: More than 30% of the respondents do it alone. 44% are much engaged in doing it so they answered "partly self, partly someone else" and only 4% "always have it done by someone else"- So the remaining 17% who tell us that they feel responsible only for the content and that putting up is done for them is a wonderful result of competency at least in the group of teachers having answered this questionnaire.
The policy of passwording the pages is split- some of our departments are engaged in the virtual university, which is passworded. So only 66% state that their pages are accesible to the public. "Search machines should find the page" state more than half of the respondents, 21% anwer with "no". How elaborated are the pages? Most are HTML with frames or style sheets, more than 47% state that they also use JAVA and plug-ins. All in all we find a broad base of resources- a human resource potential which makes us believe that the process of innovation interms of using the www for taching purposes has not ended yet. After another two weeks the completed data sheet is now available! 26.July 2002 (To be continued)