2005-06 Student Computing Survey

Technology is an integral part of daily life for a St. Olaf student.  For 17 years, IIT has been tracking student computing ownership and use so that we can provide the resources and services students need for their academic life.  This year, 2496 students took a few minutes at Fall Registration to fill out a short survey.

Computer Ownership

Student computing ownership has now reached ninety-six percent.  The sophomores lead the group with a full 98% of these students having a computer.  The junior class came in second with 94%.  The junior class has not experienced a growth in ownership since they arrived on campus.  The news on the SSS student computer ownership is mixed.  Overall, ownership is down to 78% from 82% last year, but the good news is that 82% of the first year class SSS students have a computer.  This is up from 73% last year. 

We are continuing to see more and more students selecting Macintoshes as their choice of computer.  Macintosh ownership jumped up to 20% overall; it is at 22% among the first year students. 

Laptops are “the thing” to own as 67% of the students have a laptop.  76% of the first year students have a laptop compared to just 59% of the senior class.  It is interesting to note that you really don’t see too many students toting their laptops with them around campus.  We have continued to expand the campus wireless network and this year we added wireless access points in Thorson and Kildahl.  41% of the students reported that they use the campus wireless network;  this is up from 25% last year.

Computer Lab Use

While ownership is up, the majority of students still report that they rely on the St. Olaf-provided computing labs.  Ninety three percent of the students indicated that they use the St. Olaf computing labs.  95% of the SSS students rely on one or more of the college computing labs.  While this percentage has fluctuated some from year to year the number has remained consistently high.

The residential hall computing labs remain the top computing spot for students with 70% of the students reporting that they use these facilities.  The general computing labs in the academic buildings are the second most used facilities with 53%.

Printer Ownership

Printer ownership has varied greatly in the past few years.  In 2003-04, 48% of the students brought a printer with them to campus. Last year, printer ownership was up to 60%. This year, however, ownership dropped significantly down to 43%.  This drop in printer ownership could very well be one of the causes in a dramatic increase in the number of students who are complaining that the college either doesn’t provide enough access to printers or that we have set the paper quota for free printouts too low.  Some might speculate that students are demanding more paper and more printers because the number of faculty posting course materials in Moodle and not providing handouts has risen dramatically.  Although we don’t have the data to support this, it is an area that we will monitor. 

Student Comments

Probably the most telling data we collect from the survey is the student comments.  We provide a space for students to write down whatever they feel we should know about our services and facilities.  Some of the comments provide advice, some give us a good chuckle, other comments should simply never be read or spoken!  This year, 626 students provided us with their comments on our services and facilities.

The majority of these issues have been in the Top Ten list for years while three are new to the list.  For the 4th year in a row, the number of students who had a positive comment about IIT ranked in the top spot.  Complaints about customer service, however, made the 4th spot on the list with 9.42% of the students responding complaining about our customer service attitude.  This is a concern, as well as disappointing, as this year the Helpdesk staff and student staff have been going through customer service training.

A new issue this year was a request to fix personal computer problems and this may be related to the students complaining about our customer service.  IIT does not do repairs or work on personally-owned computers.  We provide a few suggestions but we refer students to local computer dealerships or businesses for repair work, reformatting of hard drives, software installation, etc.  IIT staff have found that an increasing number of students are disappointed to find out that free computer repair and maintenance service aren’t provided.

Network issues took the 2nd and 3rd spots on the list.  Interestingly enough, the requests for faster network access came just months after IIT more than doubled our commercial Internet bandwidth and added a connection to Internet2.  Ten percent of the students who provided comments still don’t think we provide enough!  This very well could be related to a new request this year -- it didn’t make the Top Ten list -- for making the campus network more “gaming” friendly. We prioritize the amount of network traffic according to traffic types to ensure that potential academic traffic receives priority.  Network gaming traffic receives a much lower priority than web surfing or e-mail traffic.  Many other campuses are also facing similar requests for additional bandwidth for social activities.  Given priorities and budget constraints, it is unlikely that we will be able to accommodate this request.

Three issues in the Top Ten relate to printing, be it requests for more printers, better maintained printers, or more free printing. Over half of the requests for more printers came from students wanting additional printers for Ytterboe hall. One issue that didn’t make the Top Ten but is a concern relates to printing supplies. IIT is seeing a trend of increased paper theft (i.e., stealing reams of paper) from the public and residential labs. We monitor the actual number of pages printed on each printer and compare that to the paper supplies we deliver to each hall. This year the counts are dramatically off. This increase in theft comes at the same time we are seeing, for the first time, complaints about not having enough paper supplies in the labs.

Over the years the issues that make the Top Ten list vary in rankings but we normally see only small changes in the actual issues. It’s more common to see the rankings change. Sometimes we can pinpoint the change to a specific incident that could be responsible for either a new item getting added to the list or for a dramatic change in the ranking. This year there didn’t appear to be any major events that might significantly change the list, and any ideas we have about the changes are just sheer speculation.

Regardless of the reason the issues change or the rankings change, IIT uses the data we gather and any trends we identify to make adjustments in our services and facilities.  This year we will, once again, focus on customer service to see if we can turn the negative comments into positive ones.  We realize that we can’t resolve all issues and complaints, but we do make every effort to continually improve the services we provide to the students.