A Byte of Wellesley

After this initial processing and preparation of the data, we first examined the overall differences of communication methods for alumnus, current students, and professors. We surveyed all three stakeholders with the question “Rank the primary ways you communicate with your professors / your students at Wellesley.” Alumni demonstrate the highest interest in in-person meetings both within office hours and self-scheduled outside of office hours. While this is still a strong option for current students, digital communication through email is being prioritized as well as the rising popularity of zoom meeting, which wasn’t available for a large number of alumni. Professors similarly indicate their current preference in zoom meetings, which further confirms the digitalisation of professor-student communication at Wellesley.

To investigate primary impacts of this digital transition, we compared responses current students and alumni made to our normative questions such as the difficulty, efficiency, and comfortability of communication with professors. In all three categories, current students show an improvement in their experience with professor-student communication. Using the difficulty of conversation as an example, we can see from Figure 3 and Figure 4 below that the percentage of surveyed students that think communication with professors is difficult is reduced by 22.9%. This represents an overall increased ease in student-professor communication for students.

To incorporate the evolution of communication methods into our research, we surveyed all stakeholders on the specific platforms through which classroom materials and assignments are communicated. By chronologically plotting down the percentage of respondents in the same year group that responded with a specific platform, the line chart Figure 5 shows the rise and fall of different communication methods at Wellesley. We notice three different stages: 1) email-dominated communication (1995-2004); 2) the rise of FirstClass (a platform with academic and social conferences for faculty and students at Wellesley) (2004-2013) where different subsidiary platforms such as class-specific websites started; 3) the end of centralisation around FirstClass (2014-) where academic communication became fragmented between Sakai, Google Classroom, Gradescope, and many others. Not only in academic communication, we noticed this trend in social communication when we surveyed alumnus and students on how they communicated with other Wellesley students (Figure 6). Despite the line chart looking more sophisticated, the fragmentation of communication is obvious post-2014 where several communication tools became dominant at the same time. We decided to pinpoint our studies to compare and contrast before and after the fragmentation of communication methods (stage 1 and 2 vs stage 3).

To investigate how fragmentation of communication methods impacted professor-student relationship, we used the parameter: the number of professors, alumni and current students have close relationships with. While 100% of alumni found themself having close relationships with at least one professor, the current student responses include 15.1% that don’t identify themselves as close with any professor at all. This contrasts with the convenience and comfortableness current students indicated in their communication with the professor.

Therefore, we reached the conclusion from our data that the spread of digital communication has made communication easier, but more impersonal, due to the fragmentation of online social spaces.