Frequently Asked Questions

EDUCAUSE Analytics Services provides higher education leaders with data on information technology practice and use. We collect data about institutions and their technology users (e.g., students, faculty) to help you identify peer institutions, research common technology solutions, benchmark resources, and gain insight on user needs.

• Core Data Service (CDS) survey is available to EDUCAUSE members only.
• User Experience Surveys are open to all interested institutions.

EDUCAUSE Core Data Service (CDS) is a benchmarking tool that allows higher education institutions to compare their IT budgets, staffing, and service offerings with peer institutions.

EDUCAUSE user experience surveys help institutions explore student and faculty experiences and satisfaction with technology and other related topics, including workforce skills and competencies, Generative AI in teaching and learning, cybersecurity and privacy, and learning modalities.

EDUCAUSE 2025 CDS survey (member only) is an agile and lighter weight survey for collecting data to meet your finance, staffing, and services planning needs.

Institutions will be able to sign-up for and participate in the survey from mid-September through December 12, 2025.

Survey Managers should complete the Intent to Participate form. Additional questions can be directed to [email protected].

EDUCAUSE will send the primary representative or designated administrator the Appropriate Use Policy (AUP) to review and accept on behalf of the institution.

Survey instruments, including a question assignment spreadsheet, can be found here.

Visit the Survey Glossary to access insights on terms used in the 2025 CDS survey.

The question assignment spreadsheet provides the questions in organized tabs to easily allow sharing the document for contributions from others.

Visit our institutional participants page to review the list of institutions who participated in the CDS survey in 2024.

The CDS data will be distributed to participating institutions in January 2026.

EDUCAUSE uses aggregated data obtained from the CDS survey data collection efforts in professional publications, public documents, public presentations, and other forms or forums that serve its members’ needs and interests, and the needs and interests of the larger higher education and IT industries. View publications and presentations based on Analytics Services data. EDUCAUSE also reserves the right to establish other data services, both stand-alone and collaborative, when such services would best advance the overall interests of the EDUCAUSE community.

The EDUCAUSE 2025 student survey is on-demand. Institutions will be able to sign-up for and deploy a survey to their student population during a survey window of their choosing, any time from July 29, 2025, through December 12, 2025. Institutions will be able to access time-stamped survey responses from their student and/or faculty population. Please note that EDUCAUSE will not be conducting the faculty survey in 2025.

Although EDUCAUSE may use data collected through this on-demand service for research purposes as needed, the annual EDUCAUSE Student Study research will be conducted with a national sample of students. The aggregated data collected from this national sample will be sent to participating institutions for benchmarking purposes in February 2026. Participaing institutions will also receive access to their own institutional data.

The student survey helps you explore your students’ technology experiences and satisfaction as well as examine six dimensions:

• Workforce skills and competencies
• Generative AI in teaching and learning
• Mental health and accessibility services
• Cybersecurity and privacy
• Course experiences
• Hybrid learning experiences

Survey instruments are made available for review and consideration prior to making a decision to participate. A copy of the survey instrument may be required for institutions that seek IRB approval.

Students participating in the 2025 EDUCAUSE student survey will be eligible to enter for a chance to win a gift card. Participation in the incentive opportunity is completely voluntary.

According to HHS regulation 45 CFR part 46, EDUCAUSE user study surveys are considered research involving human subjects (see Chart 01; Appendix A). This research, however, is eligible for IRB exemption under HHS regulations (see Chart 04; Appendix A):

• 45 CFR part 46.104(d)(2)(iii) - Research that only includes interactions involving educational tests (cognitive, diagnostic, aptitude, achievement), survey procedures, interview procedures, or observation of public behavior (including visual or auditory recording) if the information obtained is recorded by the investigator in such a manner that the identity of the human subjects cannot readily be ascertained, directly or through identifiers linked to the subjects.
• 45 CFR part 46.111(a)(7) - When appropriate, there are adequate provisions to protect the privacy of subjects and to maintain the confidentiality of data.

EDUCAUSE no longer requires explicit IRB approval to participate in user experience surveys. This research has been granted exemption through Advarra (Formerly Quorum Review IRB), an independent ethics and regulatory review service, on the basis of the following condition:

• Research conducted in established or commonly accepted educational settings, involving normal educational practices, such as (i) research on regular and special education instructional strategies, or (ii) research on the effectiveness of or the comparison among instructional techniques, curricula, or classroom management methods.
View the "Notice of Exemption Determination."

Some institutions may continue to seek IRB approval on their own. If you need more information about the project or need assistance completing your IRB application, you can contact [email protected] and request assistance.

If your institution decides to seek IRB approval for an EDUCAUSE-hosted survey, we recommend that you apply for an IRB Exemption because this research poses no more than minimal risk to subjects and all responses will be confidential. Institutional IRB review processes will generally require the following information:

• Principal investigator—survey administrators should list themselves as principal investigators for this research
• Research description—this research asks questions about students' experiences with and attitudes towards technology. The responses collected will help institutions understand how to use technology more effectively to benefit their students. Participating Institutions will gain access to data from their own students, as well as aggregated benchmarking data from a nationally representative sample.
• Methodology—institutions choose to participate and indicate their interest by filling out an Intent to Participate form. Each institution is responsible for distributing survey links to its students. Institutions are also provided with guidance on choosing a suitable sample size for their population.
• Confidentiality—Responses to this survey are completely confidential. Email addresses and other personally identifiable data will be removed from the data set prior to the researchers’ analysis. De-identified individual response data are stored on EDUCAUSE computers and/or in cloud-based storage systems and are accessible only by authorized individuals. Due to this method of data collection, researchers are unable to remove survey responses should a withdrawal be requested.
• Risk/benefit assessment—responding to the survey is voluntary and will not directly benefit students. If an individual does not wish to participate, there will be no penalty or loss of benefits, nor will it affect their standing at their college/university in any way.

Institutions may also require information about data ownership and security, data use, integrity of the survey software, and protocol. There are several open-ended questions in the survey. It is best not to include personally identifiable information in these responses. EDUCAUSE owns and maintains the data collected for the project. De-identified individual response data are stored on EDUCAUSE computers and/or in cloud-based storage systems. The data are stored indefinitely for use in analysis and benchmarking. Data is password-protected and accessible only by authorized individuals.

If you need more information about the project or need assistance completing your IRB application, you can contact [email protected] and request assistance.

Survey Administrators should begin with these steps:

1. Complete an Intent to Participate form for the 2025 student survey.
2. Develop a survey sampling plan.
3. Deploy surveys to your users (e.g., students).
4. Monitor response rates as they come in and send reminders to complete surveys as needed.

Survey Administrators should complete the Intent to Participate form. Additional questions can be directed to [email protected].

Most institutions that deploy EDUCAUSE user experience surveys use one of the following strategies for selecting users to survey:

• Survey all users: If your institution is small (i.e. fewer than 4,000 students) or if you do not have a way to select a sample of users to invite to participate, send the survey link to your entire user population.
• Survey some users randomly: Use the Sample Planning Calculator to determine how many users to include in your sample. The recommended number of invitees will be based on your anticipated response rate and desired margin of error.

You are responsible for deploying survey links to your users (e.g., students). You may want to consider the following methods to deploy survey links:

• E-mail
• Posting links to social media
• Posting links to an LMS
• Creating posters with QR codes and hanging them throughout campus

Feel free to use the best deployment strategy for your institution.

Response rates to EDUCAUSE user experience surveys tend to be around 10%. EDUCAUSE recommends the following steps to encourage survey response:

• Send a pre-survey notification about the forthcoming survey invitation and why it is important to respond. This can be via e-mail, a push notification, social media messaging, or other communication system.
• Send a highly customized invitation message asking users to participate in the survey. Provide explicit examples of how you plan to use the data to improve their experiences.
• Send at least two reminder messages and let users know that they are running out of time to contribute their responses. Survey administrators can monitor response rates at any time by accessing the Alchemer summary report that will be provided to them. Periodically checking response rates may help inform your decisions about what type of reminder(s) to send and when.
• Partner with one or more offices (IT, IR, academic affairs, student services, president/chancellor) to send similar notifications/reminders.
• General advertising—promote the survey in a campus newspaper, on your website, in online communications, and on posters to familiarize your users with the forthcoming survey. Be mindful not to share the survey link with users outside of your sampling plan.
• Involve student leaders and organizations—clubs, student government, student newspaper/radio/TV stations—to feature students talking about the survey.

Survey Administrators will receive a link to an Alchemer summary report for their institution. This summary report updates response counts as students complete their survey, providing the Survey Administrator with real-time information about their survey campaign.

Visit our institutional participants page to review the list of institutions who participated in student and faculty surveys in 2024.

EDUCAUSE uses aggregated data obtained from the student survey data collection efforts in professional publications, public documents, public presentations, and other forms or forums that serve its members’ needs and interests, and the needs and interests of the larger higher education and IT industries. View publications and presentations based on Analytics Services data. EDUCAUSE also reserves the right to establish other data services, both stand-alone and collaborative, when such services would best advance the overall interests of the EDUCAUSE community.

Institutions that deploy any of our user experience surveys gain access to de-identified data as well as aggregate-level benchmarks. If your institution participated in a user experience survey before 2025, contact us to access your data.

If your institution participated in CDS before 2025, contact us to access your data.