Survey on teaching conservation in allied academic degree programs

For AIC’s 2013 annual meeting, Emily Williams and I developed a discussion session to examine conservation education in allied degree programs. Our overall goal for the session is to begin a dialogue about the goals and methodology of teaching conservation information and concepts to non-conservation students.
In order to provide a foundation for understanding and examining current trends in conservation pedagogy at the university level, we conducted an online survey, titled Teaching Conservation in Allied Degree Programs, prior to the session.
The survey was created using Qualtrics ( www.Qualtrics.com ) and was active for 2.5 weeks. It was distributed by link to a variety of listservs including all AIC specialty group lists, the Conservation-Research list and multiple ICOM-CC lists.  A total of 154 respondents began the survey and 111 completed it. 1 complete response was discarded because it was not appropriate (the respondent did not teach in higher education), and 8 nearly complete responses were retained. This resulted in a total of 118 responses for analysis. Several of these were re-coded to correct obvious errors (for example, when a respondent chose “other” but wrote in a response that matched one of the possible choices).
A public version of the initial survey report can be accessed here: Allied Education Survey Report – Public.  All information that might compromise respondent anonymity was removed from the public version of the report.
Many thanks to all those who took the survey! We appreciate your time and the opportunity to explore conservation education with you. We’re especially grateful to the following colleagues for testing and editing multiple versions of the survey: Cathleen Baker, Sanchita Balachandran, Holly Cusack-McVeigh, Heather Galloway, Richard McCoy, and Renée Stein.