A questionnaire was submitted to students (2007/2008) as an email, throught a news group and a physical paper copy. The following numbers were returned: 17 physical copies, 5 emails and 5 news group. While the number is too small to calculate any significance, it does present a snapshop of how students are working.

Question 1 asked for students to estimate where they worked as a percentage. Results showed the mean for students working from our lab computers was 44.44±31.87 of their time and from home computers 46.8±32.14. Only 7.4±11.32 roamed using wireless laptops. As we can see with the standard deviation, this data series is volatile. When looking at the raw results, we can see the spread where students are in the following groups: students work equally at home and from the labs; students working mainly from home; and mainly working in the labs. Having these three groups have generated a set of results that are very dispersed.

Students predominantly working from home cite: "I can recreate the School of Computing environment at home"; "Sometimes the labs are full"; "Only at uni for group work"; "concenience, comfort and quietness". Students predominantly working from labs cited: "Less distractions and resources are easily available"; "Most coursework required to run on SoC machines". From these results, there appears to be a balancing act by students on the following criteria: their environment they wish to work in; where the resources are available and how to access them; and their prefered place to work.

Question 2 asked for students to state the number of hours they worked during the different periods of the day during term time. The mean for students working in the morning was 2.19±1.25 hours; afternoon was 4.42±1.87; evening was 6.54±4.65; and night was 4.02±3.06. The students on average are spending more hours working in the evening or during the night. While this data is still volatile, it can also be seen in the results for VLE logins analysis for the day [Day profile session logins].

Students cited the following reasons for why they chose to work at different hours of the day: "I work better at night"; "I am not a morning person"; "I work a normal working day"; and "Less distractions at night"

Question 3 asked for students to state where they worked when they needed to use specific resources available at the university and in the School of Computing (for example, licensed applications). Compared to questions 1, we see the mean for working in the university has gone up a large amount to 60.54±36.96 with a drop for working from home to 30.43±34.38. This data is again volatile. Students with laptops spend approximately the same percentage of time on them with the results of showing an average of 8.48±12.16.

The students that have set up the computer systems at home to emulate the School of Computing environment have cited the following technologies: Citrix; Putty, the VPN, WinSCP and SSH. One students that uses the lab computers stated "By using Lab computers, it's easier to work on uni work that needs resources at uni"

While this questionnaire does not have enough numbers to make any significant conclusions, it has highlighted that students working habits are varied. This is demonstrated by the diverse results obtained from the questionnaire. We are currently working with the University of Leeds VLE (Blackboard) to present data showing the actual login times for School of Computing students to get a quantitative snapshop of when and where students login to work.