Student Awareness And Understanding Of Acceptable Use At Elon

Presentation at Elon Student Undergraduate Research Forum, Spring 2007

Brendan T Wolf (Dr. Lynn R. Heinrichs) Department of Computing Sciences

Elon University provides a wide variety of computing, networking and other technology facilities in order to promote and support academic pursuits. Instructional & Campus Technologies maintains and supports computing and networking services. By using University technology, users agree to abide by the policies stated in student handbooks as well as the university website.

This project examines student awareness of these policies using the following questions:

  • What level of awareness do students have about acceptable use?
  • What level of understanding do students have about acceptable use?
  • Does student awareness or understanding vary by gender, year in school or major?

These broad questions led to the creation of an exploratory study consisting of a survey that will be administered to select Computing Science Department classes because they are currently the most accessible for this study. A larger sample will be used in the future if this exploratory study is a success. Data collection from the sample will be gathered using an online Web survey form that will store all data on a local database. The students will be asked a series of questions about each of the Instructional & Campus Technologies policy areas as well as general questions about policy awareness. These questions and their answers are important because the data collected from survey participants will allow us to analyze student awareness of Instructional & Campus Technologies policies. Frequency of response will be used to analyze survey data.

The outcome will help us determine if enough is being done to inform university technology users about campus technologies policies. I believe the data from this survey will show that university technology users are not familiar with university technology policies. This is based on the reactions of my peers that have been told about this study as well as the reactions from classmates in classes where university technology has been introduced.