You are here: Home News & Alerts News Results of online survey on …

Results of online survey on change to ILIAS

In the summer term 2014, the Service Center E-Learning conducted an online survey with teaching staff, employees, and students, in order to evaluate the transition process to and level of content with the new learning environment ILIAS.

ILIAS has been the central online learning environment of Freiburg University since the summer term 2013. CampusOnline, the previous environment, was shut down on 1st October 2014. The Service Center E-Learning has accompanied the two year transitioning process with an extensive offer of workshops and support for teaching staff and employees. This included, next to regular introductory workshops also workshops for specific subject areas, the offer of telephone support or support in person, detailed online documentation, and a short documentation for transitioning to the new environment. Teaching staff who had been using tests in their CampusOnline courses were also supported in migrating their single- and multiple-choice questions to the new platform.

After the transition had bee completed in the summer term 2014, the Service Center E-Learning conducted an online survey with teaching staff, employees, and students on the transitioning process and on levels of content with the new learning environment: Were there any problems, were the supporting materials used, and how successful were support and workshops? Are there things that teaching staff and students would like to see changed, so that using the online learning environment would become even more attractive? These were some of the questions we asked.

Abb. 1: Teilnahme an Umfrage

Overall participations and result:

The survey was advertised on ILIAS, through our newsletter, as well as on several websites. Overall, 618 members of Freiburg University took part. The largest group (79 %) was students, followed by teaching staff (12 %), employees not teaching courses (6 %), and assistants and auditors (3 %) (see figure 1). These results are not representative but give an impression of active users of ILIAS.

Abb. 2: Zufriedenheit mit dem Ablauf der Lernplattformumstellung

We were pleased to se that the majority of participants (75 %) were overall content with the transition (see figure 2). The new learning environment is largely positively received. 79 % found their expectations met. Below some specific results will be detailed:

Information flow

Abb. 3: Informationen zur Umstellung

How did members of Freiburg University learn about the transition? Students heard about it from their course leaders (66 %), fellow students (29 %) and through messages on CampusOnline (29 %). Teaching staff heard about it from colleagues (51 %), but also read about it in the employee newsletter (40 %), on CampusOnline (26 %), and in information events (26 %). While teaching staff felt well-informed about the transition, 11 % of students were not able to find sufficient information. 71 %, however, felt well-informed (see figure 3). For the target group of students it can be summarized that there is room for improvement as to information flow.

Support

Abb. 4: Inanspruchnahme der Unterstützungsangebote

Since the Service Center E-Learning had offered an extensive support network, we were interested in hearing how well this was received. This question targeted only employees since there was no specific offer for students. This is the case since the target group of the Service Center E-Learning is limited to employees.

59 % of teaching staff and 70 % of employees had taken advantage of one or more of our support offers (see figure 4), which suggests that that this target group had been reached well. The level of content with the offers was high. Especially face-to-face and phone support was evaluated highly, as well as the introductory workshops to ILIAS, which had only been taken up by 12 of the participants. The majority of teaching staff learned on their own or through colleagues to use the new learning environment. 

Uptake of ILIAS

Next to questions about the transitioning process, we were also interested in how the platform was used during the summer term 2014. In average, teaching staff used ILIAS for two to three of their courses and students used four to five online course environments. Teaching staff and students spent about one hour a day on ILIAS in order to access material or administer courses. ILIAS was mostly used for supplying documents and asking questions in forums. A third of all teaching staff who participated in the survey used the module for exercises, where assignments must be submitted by a specific date. There is also a strong interest on the side of teaching staff to use interactive functions, such as blogs, wikis, portfolios, etc. in the future. 

Levels of content / satisfaction

Abb. 5: Erwartungen an ILIAS

Employees value most of all the easy upload of (multiple) data, the good structure and user-friendliness of the environment as well as the intuitive functions (apart from uploading data), e.g. wikis, surveys, exercises, tests, forums, etc. Students benefit directly from this since this makes teaching staff more motivated to use the platform and integrate new tools. 93 % of teaching staff noted that ILIAS fully or mostly meets their expectations (see figure 5).

Almost 60 % of students evaluated the serach for courses as mostly intuitive, whereas 39 % did not agree with this statement. As soon as a course is found, locating materials was mostly easy for 81 %. Central introductory workshops for students were not available; this was teaching staff's responsibility. It became apparent that there was a need on the side of students to be introduced to the learning environment, especially concerning more complex functions. Students agreed to 75 % that ILIAS met their expectations (see figure 5).

Points of criticism and problems

 Almost two thirds of the participants were able to use ILIAS without technical problems. 31 % experienced technical problems. Most often this concerned speed and accessibility, which initially was indeed problematic. Concluding the summary, participants were asked whether they thought use of the learning environment beneficial for supporting teaching in general. 97 % agreed with this fully or mostly.

Concluding remarks

The transition was not a trivial undertaking. 26.000 active users (amongst them 2.600 employees) had to transition to the new environment through workshops and information material. The Service Center E-Learning is very content with the results of the survey. They show that the transitioning process and the support systems were well received and that users are overall content with ILIAS. We also take away points for improvement in the future. This concerns information flow (especially targeting students). It also became apparent that students do not use ILIAS as intuitively as we had expected. We therefore work, on the one hand, on an optimization of the platform and, on the other hand, we will communicate this to teaching staff in our workshops.