HCI Education Survey 1994

Gary Perlman
The Ohio State University
Computer & Information Science
Columbus, Ohio, 43210 USA
perlman@acm.org

Jean Gasen
Virginia Commonwealth University
Information Systems Research Institute
Richmond, Virginia, 23284 USA
jgasen@cabell.vcu.edu

Notes on the Web Version of the Survey: This version of the survey is primarily a move from FTP access on an Ohio State University site to web access on an ACM server. When the survey was created, Web use was only beginning, but now, in 1998, Web access is more prevalent and faster than ftp access. The files have been moved and relinked, but the data files are text only, and still represent a snapshot of the field from 1994.

An updated survey, simply based on links to program Web sites, is available on the HCI Education Page. There is an online form to submit new information.

Introduction
Survey Administration
Survey Respondents
Survey Reports
Contributing to the Survey
Accessing the Survey Data
Acknowledgements
Questions/Comments?

Introduction

The HCI Education Survey contains information about programs, faculty, and courses with an emphasis on Human-Computer Interaction. The goal of the Survey is primarily to provide prospective students (particularly graduate students) information about educational opportunities, and secondarily to provide HCI educators information about other HCI educators. Unlike some other education surveys, we wanted the HCI Education Survey to be easily updated and accessed primarily in electronic form. The cost of printing and mailing the survey and the widespread availability of electronic mail and personal computers made the collection and dissemination of an electronic report preferred over print media.

Survey Administration

Before sending out the survey, we studied other surveys from The Human Factors Society (1991), The Software Engineering Institute (1991), Computer Graphics (Ferguson, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, 23:4, 243-272, 1989), and a previous survey on HCI (Mantei & Smelcer, ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 16:2, 9-43, 1984). We developed categories of information we wanted to collect from people teaching HCI-related courses. We field-tested the draft survey and made some revisions and sent the final survey to about 50 known educators in HCI. Informal communication put us in contact with others.

Survey Respondents

In 1994, about half the respondents updated their entries via email. As of early 1996, the following have responded to the survey, representing: 76 programs, 190 faculty, and 169 courses.

Survey Reports

The results were checked for consistency and completeness, and from the data, several reports were developed:

The Program Report contains the program contact person (name, email, phone, and fax), the degrees offered, the focus, facilities, and faculty (name and email) for each unit (e.g., school or department) at each institution.
The Faculty Report contains the faculty name, degree, email and phone, interests and publications for each faculty at each institution.
The Course Report contains the title, instructor, text and tools used, and course description for each course taught at each institution.
Other Reports include list of contact names/email and list of programs, sorted by region

An update on the survey results appears in the .B "ACM SIGCHI Bulletin" , April 1984, vol. 26:2, pages 8-11. It summarizes the countries of programs, department affiliations, degrees offered, number of theses, course frequency, books and tools most used in courses, and most common faculty interests.

Contributing to the Survey

To create or modify an entry for an academic unit in the HCI Education Survey, send a mail message to chi-educators-request@acm.org. Detailed instructions and an electronic form will be sent to you. Please do not submit data without contacting us first.

Accessing the Survey Data

The Survey results are available on the World-Wide Web (WWW) and via email. This document is available as a WWW page index.html with links to the reports and data files. If you can't access the reports on the web, we can send the survey results via email. Send your request for files to: chi-educators-request@acm.org

Acknowledgements

Partial support for the Survey was provided by The Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Human Computer Interaction (ACM SIGCHI). Additionally, Ohio State University and Virginia Commonwealth University have provided support for the project. Finally, the Project gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Tom Hewett, Gary Strong, and Marilyn Mantei for their help getting the Survey started, Terry Winograd and Michelle Wang Baldonado for motivating the WWW version of this document, and the encouragement provided by IFIP WG13.1 on Curricula in Human-Computer Interaction. We would also like to thank all those individuals who took the time to respond to our requests for survey data. Their responses are helping to build a database of HCI Education information that will be shared around the world.