Introduction

A prevailing view of today's post secondary learners is that they are fundamentally different than previous generations in how they learn, what they value in education, how they use technology, and how they interact. The notion of the "Millennial learner" or "digital learner" has become accepted as a fact, even though there is limited empirical support for this.  Many institutions have designed their ICT initiatives to help meet the educational access and learning needs of Millennial students.  In light of this, we sought to gain a more accurate understanding of the Millennial learners at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT), a Canadian polytechnic. In the spring of 2007, we conducted 43 semi-structured interviews with 84 students and instructors from a sample that represented a cross-section of BCIT programs. Interview questions centred on formal and informal uses of technologies, in particular, technologies used for student-student and instructor-student communication. We present our findings based on the thematic analysis of the interview data, and assess the relevance of the typologies of Millennial learners in relation to our own institution.

BCIT is a public polytechnic institution that provides access to programs that are not typically found at public universities.  Program delivery options include a range of face-to-face, blended/web-enhanced, and distance delivered programs.  In 2004, BCIT launched the Technology-enabled knowledge (TEK) initiative to fully integrate the use of educational technology for teaching, and to make programs more accessible and relevant to students. In the third year of this seven- year initiative, we recognized the need to get a better understanding of student technology needs, in order to ensure that the initiative would continue to go in the right direction.  We also observed that some of the technological and pedagogical implementations of this initiative were being based on the popular description of the Millennial learner, and we recognized the need to assess the accuracy of this description in relation to our own students.
             
This article summarizes the data taken from a larger study being conducted by Adnan Qayyum around information communication technologies (ICTs) in higher education.  Data collection was undertaken by both Qayyum and the BCIT research team (Mark Bullen, Karen Belfer, Tannis Morgan, and Terry Fuller).  Data analysis was conducted separately by Qayyum and the BCIT researchers, and the data presented in this article focuses on the analysis undertaken by the BCIT team.