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Do college students want different things from their technologies than those of us who work in higher ed?
Now that I have two kids in college, I am finally in a position to definitively answer this question. From my sample size of 2, I am fully prepared to extrapolate to all 20.4 million undergraduates enrolled in degree-granting postsecondary institutions.
1 - College Students Still Want Laptops:
My kids could not imagine going to college without a laptop. The laptop remains the essential tool for doing college work. In no way does it seem that the tablet - the iPad - has replaced the laptop. Nor is a phone a substitute for the laptop when it comes to doing coursework.
The idea that the work of being a college student is built around a laptop is interesting, as many of us thought that phones and tablets would be ascendant by 2017. Social media has moved to the phone, so why not college work? In this way, college students are similar to people who work in higher education - we are all dependent on our laptops to do our work.
2 - College Students Prioritize Mobility Over Most Everything Else:
Having noticed that laptops are still a necessity for doing college work, it is also true (from my N=2) that college students want small and light laptops. My daughters both chose the little 2.03 pound MacBook for their 4 years in college. I tried to push them to a computer with more ports, but they would have none of it.
Most folks that I know who work in higher ed look for a balance between the size of their laptop, and the features that it provides. We want bigger screens and keyboards, and certainly more than 1 USB-C port. College students may be making a different calculus, in that they need to bring their laptops wherever they are learning and working, thus small size and light weight matters most.
3 - College Students Don’t Distinguish Between Cloud and Local Computing:
Today’s generation of students don’t seem to distinguish the cloud from local computing. (At least my daughters don’t). They grew up having all their schoolwork live on Google Drive - and that is where they expect their college work to live as well. They don’t think about saving their work to local hard drives, and they don’t use USB drives. They expect that their data will always be accessible from any screen.
Those of us who work in higher education at least think about having local copies of our data. We seem to work in MS Office more than students, and we still largely store our Word, Excel, and PowerPoint docs on our local machines. We use USB drives all the time.
4 - Some College Students Really Really Prefer Paper Textbooks:
Here is my observation from watching the two college students in which I’m paying the tuition. Half of all college students want their course materials to be digital, and half want their course materials to be paper. The half that loves digital textbooks and other course materials values the ease of searching and annotating e-books. They like that the readings exist on the same laptop in which they are writing papers. The other half of college students feels that they learn better with paper. They like to make notes directly on the paper with pens and highlighters. They need to avoid the distraction of the screen.
If my observation is correct, then our rush to all digital curricular materials may be a mistake. Perhaps it makes sense to follow what our students want to do in terms of the mediums in which they want to learn. Have we really talked to our students about why they might prefer paper over digital? Who are we disadvantaging in our push to digital course materials?
5 - Even If College Students Wanted to Get Rid of Facebook, They Can’t:
We tend to think of Facebook as a choice. Maybe we are wrong. From what I’ve observed, it is awfully hard to navigate college without going on Facebook. So many official and ad hoc campus groups are on Facebook. Facebook makes it easier to find and message students at your school than other methods, such as e-mail. Much of the information transfer that people who work in higher education depend on e-mail and websites to accomplish seems to occur on Facebook for college students.
Have we really thought about the consequences of this Facebook dependency, if indeed this is a real thing? Is anyone studying the idea of non-optional social networking? Are there college students who simply don’t go on Facebook? I’m someone who doesn’t go on Facebook, and I don’t miss the platform in my higher ed role. I’m not sure that our students have the same choice.
Can you make any sweeping generalizations of college student technology usage based on your kids?
