Student Preferences and Opinions on Academic Internet Integration - A Five-Year Study
Sandra Poindexter, Tawni Hunt Ferrarini
From 1999-2003 a five-year higher education study on student attitudes towards course-related Internet usage was conducted at a Midwestern public university. The study focused upon Internet integration into traditional courses using tools such as syllabi posting, links to online readings, and class emails, rather than web-delivered, asynchronous courses. Using a large cross-disciplinary, repeated sampling of undergraduate students the study was able to track trends and identify student preferences. Through the identification of preferences, the future costs associated with the adoption of Internet technologies into mainstream higher education can decrease, and the rate of adoption success can increase. Baselines of demographic and usage statistics were collected annually to observe changes before and after a laptop standardization program was institutionalized in Year 3 of the study.
Keywords: Diffusion of Innovation, User Attitudes, User Behaviors, Education IS, Technology Trends
Sandra Poindexter is a full professor of computer information systems at NMU. She has served as Chair of the Teaching and Learning Advisory Council to the NMU Senate, has been a member of the Curriculum for the 21st Century Task Force at NMU, and researches teaching innovations, which are incorporated into her courses.
Tawni Ferrarini is an associate professor of economics at Northern Michigan University (NMU). She has served as Chair of the NMU Academic Senate, Chair of the Academic Information Services Advisory Committee to the Senate, been a member of Educational Technology Resources and Policy Committee and actively develops online pedagogy in the field of economics.
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