Faculty Needs Assessment Survey

Executive Summary

Fall, 2020

The Office of Technology for Teaching and Learning (OTTL) administered a Faculty Needs Assessment Survey near the end of the Fall 2020 semester for several reasons, which include:

● To identify areas and topics of needed/desired training,

● To discover specific challenges or “pain points” faculty may be having,

● To discover what new tools faculty may be using,

● To identify faculty’s biggest struggles with academic integrity and how they are solving it.

Together, along with data from our support request database, the results from the survey will be used to direct the efforts of our office to ensure we focus on the areas and issues of most importance to faculty during these difficult times. With limited capacity, it is imperative that OTTL makes the best use of the resources available, including staff time. To that end, having a better understanding of the current struggles facing faculty, what topics are of interest for further development, and other tools being utilized will help us prioritize and plan upcoming workshops, develop useful resources and identify additional ways we can support faculty especially during this dynamic environment.

While the survey results did not yield anything particularly surprising, they did validate many assumptions and beliefs held by the OTTL staff about the current climate. For example, OTTL suspected that most faculty were no longer working at a very basic or beginner level as they had been when the transition to remote learning began back in March. Since that rapid transition and the need to learn at least the basics very quickly, many faculty have grown significantly and now consider themselves an intermediate to moderately advanced user (80.3% collectively), which explains the increasing complexity of most of the support requests.

Overview of the Results

The Faculty Needs Assessment Survey was open from November 9 - November 17. A total of 91 individuals responded, but not to all questions as all questions were not required. We asked questions about D2L/LIVE, Panopto, Zoom, teaching and learning, academic integrity, and OTTL resources. These are all areas in which OTTL provides support to faculty.

Overall, usage of the tools provided to deliver courses is quite strong. D2L/LIVE is being used by nearly all of the respondents (91.2%), whereas Panopto and Zoom have considerably less usage. While the topics of most interest for further learning in D2L were generally more advanced topics this wasn’t necessarily the case for Panopto or Zoom, most likely due to different adoption patterns and levels. However, the interest levels in more development on all these tools is pretty consistent across the board.

When it comes to teaching and learning topics and faculty pain points, the overwhelming majority were related to student engagement, which includes everything from active teaching in both the asynchronous and synchronous classes, attendance and participation, building a community in online classes and improving discussions. Then there were struggles with building quizzes/exams and learning to use the gradebook feature in D2L. The other most common struggle revolved around time - time to do all the work of creating and converting course materials to time to work with students and be responsive to their needs.

Some faculty have found tools, such as Explain Everything, Nearpod, Kahoot, Edpuzzle, and Poll Everywhere to help keep students engaged. Google apps including Docs, Sites and Meet are also being incorporated in various ways to engage students or hold virtual meetings with students. Faculty are finding additional sources of content to supplement their own through textbook resources, YouTube and general searches. Although some faculty reported finding useful tools, a good number indicated (14) they have not found any and with only 38 responses to this question, it is likely many others did not have any tools to mention so they skipped the question.

As one person put it, “Academic integrity for remote instruction is THE issue”. While there were varied responses as to how faculty are handling academic integrity, the majority of sentiments suggest that when given the opportunity students will look for a way to cheat but faculty are doing their best to be vigilant. Many faculty are using the tools provided, such as Turnitin, Lockdown Browser and Monitor, with good success but some are doing face-to-face exams because they aren’t comfortable with these tools. Some are also doing live proctoring even in remote sessions. Certain departments are using Examsoft and other faculty are opting to do alternative types of assessments to make cheating more difficult in the first place.

The remaining questions were about OTTL resources. We asked about interest in taking the Facilitating Learning Online course (FLO) and 18 indicated interest, 33 responded as maybe and 34 stated they were not interested, but many had already taken the course. The most interest was to take FLO in January before the start of the spring semester. Forty out of 91 respondents indicated they have visited the OTTL Contingency Planning website and 75.6% found it to be useful or somewhat useful.

Next Steps

OTTL plans a 3-pronged approach to addressing the needs expressed in the survey.

1. Develop a resource organized by tool and topic that points to existing resources on the most popular topics which will be shared out before the holiday break. View the resource here.

2. Create a workshop schedule to be offered in January. These will focus on some of the most frequently mentioned items combined with our most frequent support request topics.

3. Create and share an FAQ document that addresses as many of the remaining topics as possible. This will be the last item to be released as it will take some time to put together.

The earlier release of some resources will allow those faculty who want to get a jump on things over the holiday break to be able to learn the things they need utilizing existing resources. There are previously recorded workshops on many of the topics. The live January workshops will address the topics that were most commonly mentioned and frequently received as support requests, but are also the ones that are better dealt with in a live session due to the nuances of the tool/topic.

View the summary results here: Summary Results

View the full set of responses here: Full Results