8 Survey Method & Findings
Method
Members of the University of Windsor community were invited to give informed consent and complete an online survey on August 15, 2017. The survey is adapted from an academic-level survey developed by the Australian Government’s Office for Learning and Teaching that focused on the perceptions of academic staff (e.g., instructors, advisors, educational developers, etc.) about learning analytics (West, Heath, & Huijser, 2016). The original instrument builds on previous frameworks that examined institutional readiness and development of organizational capacity for learning analytics (Arnold, Lonn, et al., 2014; Bischel, 2012; Norris & Baer, 2012) that are relevant to the current study in Ontario, Canada. As students are arguably the most important stakeholders in LA implementations, we adapted the questions to include their perceptions. The survey included 20 questions organized into 5 sections:
- role and experience;
- teaching;
- Learning Analytics (LA) involvement and interest;
- LA needs and aspirations; and
- values and ethics in LA.
The survey was hosted in Qualtrics online survey software, and was set to allow anonymous responses. SPSS was used for quantitative analysis to compute descriptive statistics, while thematic coding was used for qualitative analysis.
Results
Role and experience
Responses were collected from 45 participants who held different roles in the university including faculty, educational developers, graduate assistants, teaching assistants, a lecturer, a departmental support staff, and a librarian.
[Insert frequency table of role – Excel]
