Surveying the (changing) experience of our students

I teach a class on digital literacy in the Internet era, and the backgrounds and digital experience of my students change every year. (See the Beloit College Mindset List for general changes in student backgrounds).

As such, I start the term with a student background survey, which serves three purposes 1) I use the survey results to assign the students to study groups 2) to let the students see how their background compares with others and 3) to provide an example of an Internet-based service -- online survey processing -- which we can discuss in class.

You can see this term's survey results here. (I've omitted the answers to open-ended question like what is your major (they vary considerably), what audio, video or image editor do you use (most answer "none" to all three) and what is your relevant work experience).

I would appreciate suggestions for changes to my survey -- what else would be useful and informative to know?

Do you conduct a similar survey? If so, what do you ask?

-----

Update 9/8/2013

Thirty three freshmen, one sophomore, seven juniors and fourteen seniors completed the survey. Their majors were:

Babson survey of online education in the US -- online continues fast growth

The results of the tenth annual survey of online education have been published. Here are some key findings:

• Over 6.7 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2011 term, an increase of 570,000 students over the previous year.
• Thirty-two percent of higher education students now take at least one course online.
• Only 2.6 percent of higher education institutions currently have a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), another 9.4 percent report MOOCs are in the planning stages.
• Academic leaders remain unconvinced that MOOCs represent a sustainable method for offering online courses, but do believe that they provide an important means for institutions to learn about online pedagogy.
• Seventy-seven percent of academic leaders rate the learning outcomes in online education as the same or superior to those in face-to-face.
• Only 30.2 percent of chief academic officers believe that their faculty accept the value and legitimacy of online education - a rate is lower than recorded in 2004.
• The proportion of chief academic leaders that say that online learning is critical to their long-term strategy is at a new high of 69.1 percent.
• A majority of chief academic officers at all types of institutions continue to believe that lower retention rates for online courses are a barrier to the wide-spread adoption of online education.

The report contains many PowerPoint-ready plots and graphs. You can see some highlights in this infographic.