The Higher Education Landscape: Two Reports

Two recent reports provide some insight into the higher education landscape:

The 2014 Inside Higher Ed Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology reported on the results of a survey of 2,799 faculty members and 288 campus technology administrators about online education. Among the findings are that only 9 percent of faculty members strongly believe that online education can be equivalent to in-person courses. The value of MOOCs appears to be questionable, and there's some doubt about the usefulness of digital humanities. There was no mention of the role or impact of the library on online education. Nevertheless, a very interesting report.

The Leadership Board for CIOs has conducted an annual survey of CIOs for the past several years. The 2014 Survey of Chief Information Officers provides a complete picture of technology in higher education institutions. The survey was sent to nearly 1,000 CIOs in April and May, 2014, and the response rate was 23%. Sixty percent of the respondents were from public institutions; 37 percent from private, non-profits; and 2 percent from for-profit institutions. Information collected in the survey included institutional and CIO characteristics; financial and budget planning; IT organization and governance; consumerization of IT; administrative computing: academic technologies, MOOCs, and innovation; infrastructure, networking and security; cloud computing and big data; institutional standards; and new and emerging technologies. One item of interest was how few higher education institutions are relying on open source products for administrative computing needs (0 percent). As the report states, "[m]ost institutions prefer [enterprise resource planning] vendor-provided systems that are tightly integrated and under the control of their institution, as opposed to outsourced solutions" (p. 18). Libraries were mentioned twice. Centralized management of library services takes place in 17 percent of responding institutions, and 38 percent of them reported some library applications that were cloud-based.