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• IT Enrolments 1999 Report
• 5. Methodology

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• Statistics on IT in NZ
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• Sizing the Internet in NZ

• Relative Weight
• Relevance
• Level
• Sensitivity Testing

Initially, courses were identified from a search of the 1999 Calendars of the seven major universities (Auckland University of Technology was excluded as it was not established until late in the year). The relevance of the course content to this survey was decided on the basis of the description included with the course prescription. A list of courses for each identified teaching department (or other appropriate administrative unit) was mailed to the head of department who was asked to provide information on the numbers of students enrolled in and completing courses during the 1999 university year. Feedback from respondents was encouraged in order to test the assumptions made in the initial course evaluations. As a result of such feedback, additional courses were included in the survey. In addition, feedback received about other assumptions made in the survey such as degree of relevance was incorporated as appropriate.

Returns have been received covering all but seven of the 662 courses identified. None of these seven were in the "highly relevant" category.

Universities in New Zealand have a high degree of autonomy in the design and content of courses. In order to place courses on a comparable basis, a "relevance value" was calculated for each course (the terms used in this expression and assigned values are defined below):

Relevance value = level times relevance times relative weight

"Relevance value points" for courses were calculated by multiplying the "relevance value" by the number of students completing the course.

Relative Weight

Each university has its own methodology in assigning points or units in assessing the contribution that a course makes towards a degree programme. For the purposes of this exercise, "course" was defined as being equivalent to "one paper for one semester" or roughly one eighth (0.125) of an EFTS. Such a course has a relative weight of 1.0. A few courses, such as research papers, are weighted at 2.0 and others at 0.5.

Relevance

It was important to include not just core technology areas but also to capture other areas of importance to an information technology-based economy, such as IT in education. For the results to be useful to anyone needing to assess the level of technical education and training in New Zealand, courses were weighted according to "relevance" in the context of meeting the needs for a project of the type proposed by Motorola. "Relevance" was assessed according to the following categories based on an interpretation of the prescription for each course.

Level

First, second, third or subsequent year of study. Although the survey attempted to differentiate between fourth year (including honours level courses) and graduate courses forming part of a Masters degree, in terms of instructional level these are seen as being equivalent. In order to recognise the greater relative contribution of a (say) fourth year course compared with a first year course, courses were weighted as follows:

Sensitivity Testing

A check was made of the weighting scheme in order to ensure that the arbitrary relative values assigned were not unduly distorting the relationships between the different universities Figure 4. Two different schemes were tested using the alternative weightings in the table below. Percentages for RVP in Table 4 varied by no more than 0.5% overall and the positions of different universities relative to each other were unaffected.