Introduction

Every year, the Division of Information Technology (DIT) within the University of Maryland (UMD), administers technology experience surveys developed by EDUCAUSE, a national nonprofit association centered on the intersection of technology and higher education. In 2024, a student survey was administered to 8,000 UMD students, and a parallel faculty survey was administered to 1,000 UMD instructors of record. This report summarizes the findings from those surveys.

UMD represents many things to many people, whether it’s a leader in teaching and learning innovation, a technological research hub, or a foundation for developing key workforce competencies. A large part of this year’s surveys addresses the roles that technology plays in helping students and instructors realize their educational and professional goals, no matter what UMD means to them. In some areas, such as making course materials readily available to students, technology services and supports have become indispensable. In others, such as providing student data to inform instruction, technology still plays only a secondary role to traditional mechanisms of student feedback.

Other sections of this year’s surveys offer new updates on students’ and instructors’ experiences and attitudes around evolving concerns in higher education technology. A section on generative AI (GenAI) provides a look at how the use and perception of these tools may have changed in only a semester since the campus-wide survey on GenAI was conducted in Spring 2024. Finally, added insights regarding students’ and instructors’ experiences with in-person, online, and hybrid learning show how modality preferences and expectations have developed in recent years.

Main Findings

1. Technology at UMD helps facilitate learning and alleviate financial constraints. Most students (71%) said it is easy or very easy to access and use course materials assigned by instructors, and many pointed to instructors’ use of ELMS-Canvas to provide materials or recorded lectures as a practice that enhanced their learning experience. Additionally, both students (54%) and instructors (61%) indicated that the use of digital assignments had helped students manage financial constraints by preventing the need to print materials.
2. Students and instructors have similar views on acceptable GenAI use. The uses of GenAI that were most common among students, including brainstorming and idea generation (49%) and outlining and organizing (38%), were the same uses that most instructors said should be allowed. Students have adopted GenAI to a greater extent than instructors, and 73% of students expect to use it in their careers to at least some extent. Most instructors (61%) decide not to use GenAI themselves within their courses, but more feel optimistic (37%) about GenAI compared to pessimistic (24%).
3. Instructors use student feedback to inform course design, teaching, and advising, but they want more training on the use of student data. About 3 in 5 (59%) of instructors said they use student data to inform instruction, and when asked to elaborate, most referred to the use of informal student feedback (such as surveys) or formal measures of performance (such as assessments). However, only 43% of these instructors said that UMD provides them with the support they need to use student data effectively.
4. Students and instructors prefer in-person teaching and learning. The majority of students (61%) said they prefer in-person course experiences, with most of these students saying they learn better (92%) and feel more focused (77%) in this modality. Similarly, 56% of instructors prefer in-person teaching (while another 25% prefer hybrid). Many of the feedback mechanisms that instructors say they rely on, such as direct interaction with students (cited by 97% of instructors) and nonverbal cues and behaviors (86%) may be more challenging to pick up on within an online environment.

Survey administration and response rates

The student and instructor surveys were administered concurrently from October 1, 2024 to October 18, 2024. A sample of 8,000 undergraduate students were selected via a stratified sampling method, such that the proportion of students surveyed within each class year matched their proportion of the entire undergraduate population. Students were selected randomly within each class year. For the instructor survey, a sample of 1,000 instructors of record in the Fall 2024 semester was randomly selected. The student response rate was 3.2% (representing 259 students) and the instructor response rate was 10.7% (representing 107 instructors). Caution is warranted when interpreting the student data, in particular, due to the lower response rate.

Figure 1, below, shows the timeline of survey administration along with promotion efforts, including reminder emails that were narrowcasted to nonrespondents, a notification sent to students with the UMD app, and a prenotification email sent to half of survey invitees.

Survey administration took place in October 2024.

Figure 1. Timeline of survey administration along with promotion efforts.