In recent years the scholarship of teaching has gained increasing recognition in engineering education as a legitimate and valuable faculty activity. Growing numbers of faculty members engaged in educational research have been using surveys as principal components of their assessment programs. These researchers quickly discover that using individual interviews or paper forms to get responses is extremely time-consuming and often prohibitively expensive, and they turn instead to electronic surveys. The two main vehicles for such surveys are e-mail and World Wide Web-based forms. Web surveys are attractive since they allow for automatic tabulation and analysis of responses, but there is a concern that the additional effort they require of respondents could lead to a severe reduction in response rate.
The study to be reported was designed to examine the legitimacy of that concern. Engineering professors at two SUCCEED (Southeastern University and College Coalition for Engineering EDucation) campuses were surveyed regarding their use of various teaching techniques and their perceptions of the importance of teaching quality and innovation to their colleagues and administrators. The 361 faculty members surveyed were randomly assigned to fill out identical surveys using either the Web or e-mail. Those who were asked to respond via e-mail were much more likely to return the survey (29% vs. 16%), and full professors in particular were extremely unlikely to use the Web. There were few significant differences in the responses based on the survey method. Possible explanations of these results are proposed and their implications for survey research are explored.