Abstract:

The rapid growth of online education has on many levels affected the professional role of all teachers in higher education. For the online educator, tools such as Learning Management Systems (LMS), email and social media are essential for everyday work. At the same time these educational technologies are used increasingly in regular campus-based education, and are in fact becoming de facto standards at many universities, partly as a consequence of many teachers alternating between online, campus-based and blended modes of delivery, and partly because students in higher education are incorporating open educational resources (OER:s) into their personal learning environments.

We set out to explore the research question: To what extent does the use of Information and communication technologies (ICT) for teacher-student communication differ between campus-based and online education? And to what extent does the use of IT to this respect vary between various academic disciplines? In order to address these questions, a large-scale survey was launched at two universities in Scandinavia. Survey data was collected at two separate occasions (2011 and 2013) and the instrument collected information about:
• Responders’ demographics and background
• Magnitude and Scope of Use of LMS
• Magnitude and Scope of Use of email
• Magnitude and Scope of Use of other ICT resources (social media, OER:s, etc.)
• Attitudes towards ICT in higher education

The results show that even though there are some significant differences between campus and online education, the differences are more related to the magnitude of use (i.e. how much time is spent on using ICT) than the scope of use (i.e. how many different technologies/functionalities that are used). Furthermore the data show that there are no significant differences with respect to the attitudes towards IT as a valuable tool for higher education between teachers engaged in online or campus-based education. Notable is also that none of the background variables such as gender, experience, or group-size had significant impact on neither use nor attitudes towards ICT

Keywords:

Higher Education, Attitudes to ICT, Magnitude and Scope of Use.