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Opinion
Survey Said ...
5/10/2007
I look forward each year to the EDUCAUSE annual Current Issues Survey Report. There is always something new and interesting, be it the ways in which the survey instrument itself has been shaped to reflect the association’s view of the field or in the results of the survey. An example of the former is the inclusion of a new category of issues for 2007: "Commercial/External Online Services," which reflects the ongoing assimilation by campus IT (forced, it sometimes seems) of externally produced consumer information services, such as blogs, wikis, survey engines, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and Skype.Before I get into some of the more interesting findings, a quick briefing on how the survey works is in order, because it really, really helps to better read and understand the survey’s findings, if you understand the issue lists and where they come from, the four questions that are asked, who they are asked of, and how the results are sliced, diced, and then reported, in terms of groupings of institutional types.
Lists of Issues
EDUCAUSE presents lists of issues and subtopics to respondents. The lists reflect an advisory board balance ”between preserving issues across time and introducing (a) new issues that arise as a consequence of emerging technologies and solutions, (b) converged issues that no longer make sense to separate, (c) split issues that are too complex to continue as one, and (d) changes in the evolving IT nomenclature.”
The Questions
EDUCAUSE then asks what it calls its “primary member representatives” to complete the survey. Since EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit professional association that has institutional membership, those primary member representatives tend each to be the senior IT on a particular campus who, among other things, authorizes a continuing EDUCAUSE membership for the institution.
Each respondent is asked to answer one of four specific questions about the issues presented in the lists. I’ve abbreviated them here to save space but hopefully have not changed the thrust of each one.
Which of the issues:
- Currently have the most strategic importance to your institution?
- Have the potential to become more important during the next year?
- Are you, the IT leaders, spending the most time coping with?
- Are your campus spending the most human and financial resources coping with?
The report then uses various measures to “slice and dice” the findings. Three “slices” are available for the dicing operation: the institutions’ “control” structure, which means public or private; the institutions’ sizes, in numbers of students; and the institutions’ Carnegie classifications.
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