Responses to the Canadian survey of online and distance learning

Hi, everyone, and welcome back. I hope you all had a great summer. As many readers will know, I am leading a team conducting a survey of online and distance learning in Canadian public post-secondary educational institutions. You can get more general information about the survey from earlier posts:

• Building a national survey of online learning in Canada, (2 December, 2016)

• Update on Canadian survey of online learning (27 May, 2017)

During the summer the survey team has been extremely busy. We have now completed the collection of data and have started on the analysis and report writing.

Thanks to support from Contact North, we are building a web site for the survey which will contain news about the survey, access to the reports, and opportunities to discuss the results and their implications. However this won’t be ready for a couple of weeks, so I wanted to provide an update on where we are at the moment, especially as I know some of you have been engaged in collecting data for the survey (many thanks!). 

Building a database of institutions

As this is the first year for the survey the focus is exclusively on provincially funded and accredited post-secondary educational institutions, which still represent by far the majority of post-secondary institutions and students in Canada.

One challenge the survey faced was the lack of a commonly used, publicly accessible database of all Canadian public post-secondary educational institutions. We worked our way through the membership listings of Universities Canada, Colleges and Institutes Canada (CICAN), Maclean’s EduHub, and provincial government web sites. From Statistics Canada we could find only aggregate data on student enrolments broken down by province and by part-time or full time students, but not data for individual institutions. 

We ended up with a list of 203 institutions, once we had eliminated duplications, incorporated affiliated colleges and universities with the main institution awarding the qualification, and removed institutions not funded by provincial governments. We also identified institutions by language (anglophone or francophone) and their total student headcount (full-time and part-time), almost entirely from information publicly available through provincial government web sites, although not all provinces provide this information. We then had to identify the appropriate contact person in each institution (usually Provosts or VPs Education).

This process resulted in 

• 72 universities (35%),
• 81 colleges outside Québec (40%), and
• 50 CEGEPs/colleges within Québec (25%).

Of the 203 institutions, 70 (34%) were either francophone institutions or were bi-lingual institutions with a separate francophone program. 

One thing that became clear even at this stage is that there is no consistency between provinces and Statistics Canada on how data about students is collected or reported. Several different measures are used: student headcount (full time, or full time and part-time); student course enrolments; student FTEs (full-time equivalents); and student program enrolments, with variations within each of these broad categories. Also some data include non-credit, continuing education students as well as students taking courses for credit. All this variation in student statistics makes inter-provincial comparisons very difficult. In the end, for the database of all institutions, we used primarily official provincial student headcounts, the measure most common across all provinces.

Statistics Canada’s most recent figures for Canadian post-secondary student enrolments are for the fall of the 2014/2015 academic year (in our survey, we are looking at fall 2016 enrolments). Statistics Canada’s enrolment numbers are based on program counts and not student counts. If a student is enrolled in more than one program as of the snapshot date, then all of their programs are included in the count.

Table 1: Comparison of StatCan student enrolment numbers, and student headcount totals from institutions in the survey population base

Without knowing more about the basis on which Statistics Canada built its data, we cannot explain the difference between the two populations sets, but the differences are relatively small, except for CEGEPs. We are confident we have included all the CEGEP institutions but we probably do not have all enrolled students counted, just those for which the Québec provincial government provides funding, from which we derived the data. Nevertheless, if we take Statistics Canada data as the comparator, our population base appears to represent a very large proportion (93%) of students studying for institutional credit at Canadian public post-secondary institutions.

We will be providing on the survey web site a list of all the institutions we included in the population database.

Response rates

The questionnaire itself was online and was accessed using a link unique for each participant institution. The final cut-off date for the full questionnaire was June 30, 2017. At this point, for those institutions that had not responded, an invitation was sent to complete a shorter questionnaire that excluded questions on student enrolments.

Table 2: Response rate by type of institution

It can be seen that 128 institutions (63%) completed the full questionnaire, and 140 (69%) completed either the full or the shorter version of the questionnaire. The response rate was lower for small institutions (59% overall for institutions with less than 2,000  students, compared with 79% for institutions with more than 10,000 students). The responding institutions were spread proportionately across all provinces and nearly all territories.

If we look at the response rate by the number of student enrolments, Table 3 below indicates that the survey covered institutions with 78% of the overall Canadian student population in public post-secondary education.

Table 3: Student headcounts for institutions responding compared to overall student headcounts.

Conclusion

It should be remembered that this was a voluntary survey with no formal government requirement to complete. Our target was a 75% response rate, which we have achieved in terms of the number of students covered by the survey, although the number of institutions covered fell a little short of the target at 69%. Nevertheless we think we have a large enough response rate to make valid and reliable statements about the state of online and distance learning in Canadian post-secondary education.

This would not have been possible without first of all a huge effort by the institutions to provide the data, and secondly a great deal of support from the various professional associations such as CICAN, Universities Canada, the eCampuses in Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta and British Columbia, Contact North, REFAD, and others too numerous to describe in a short blog post.

Next steps

We are now in the process of analyzing the results. We expect to have a draft report that will go out to selected readers in two weeks time. We will then produce two ‘public’ reports:

• a main executive report that covers the main findings (in English and French)
• a full research report that provides an analysis of all the data collected from the survey.

Both these reports will be ready for publication and a launch at the ICDE World Conference on Online Learning in Toronto on October 17, 2017. 

We will also be developing a number of sub-reports, such as one on francophone institutions, and one on Ontario (which was a primary funder of the survey).

In the meantime, as soon as the survey web site is ready I will let you know. This will contain preliminary results and an update on activities surrounding the survey, such as future plans and developments, and, from October 17, copies of all the reports as they become available.