Survey Purpose

The survey was constructed as a brief, attitudinal survey to get a feel where respondents felt open source in higher education was headed. The survey focused on ascertaining familiarity and projected market penetration of a list of open source software initiatives, the perceived vulnerability of selected application areas to open source competition, and the collection of information on what respondents would like to know more about with respect to open source.

Methodology

The survey was conducted via a brief web survey that required an email address to receive results and also disabled multiple responses from the same IP address.  Invitations to the survey were made to the A-HEC membership at large via a link in a monthly update email, to A-HEC members specifying an interest in open source or IT in their profile via an email invitation, to select other contacts involved in open source initiatives via an email invitation, and from links placed in high traffic areas of the A-HEC web site.

 Respondents were asked to rate themselves according to their expertise level in open source, their job category, and the classification of their institution by both type and operating budget.  This respondent information was used to ascertain how results varied according to these dimensions.

Respondent characterization:

Seventy-nine (79) responses were received over an approximately two-week period, showing good interest in the topic.

 Job categories of respondents:

§    29% of the respondents categorized themselves as CIOs or technical staff

§       28% of the respondents categorized themselves as instructional or academic support staff

§       19% characterized themselves as administrative staff

§       10% characterized themselves as higher education executives

§       13% characterized themselves as affiliated with a corporation – 11% as corporate executive level

§       [See survey results question #8]

Institution representation distribution:

§       A reasonable distribution of institution types were represented in the sample of respondents as compared to the industry at large

§       There was a somewhat of an under-representation from the non-profit private institutions (12% - note that non-profit private institutions contribute about 40% of the institutions but only about 20% of the students)

§       Community colleges were somewhat under-represented at 20%

§       For-profit institution respondents (20%) and four year public non-profit respondents (42%) were somewhat over-represented

§       Almost half of the institutional respondents came from institutions with operating budgets greater than $200 million, which means that the larger schools were over-represented in our sample compared to the industry distribution

Knowledge level:

52% of the respondents rated their knowledge of open source as poor or fair.  16% rated their knowledge as good.  31% rated their knowledge as excellent or expert.  Thus, the respondent pool was weighted slightly towards those that felt their knowledge of open source was fairly weak.   Although we have no way to know for sure how this sample compares to the population at large, the “gut-feel” is that our sample was much more knowledgeable than the overall population of higher education technologists and administrators. [See survey results question #7]