Using ICT to Support Alumni Data Collection in Higher Education

Getting feedback from external stakeholders, especially alumni and employers, is a challenging task for higher education institutions. It is important for many reasons, such as providing information to policy makers, assessing quality of academic programmes, adapting academic programmes to labour market needs, and marketing purposes. Alumni and employer surveys are usually used as methods for collecting data from stakeholders. Research suggests that major problems in data collection are related to efficiency and effectiveness of data collection process. This paper presents a different method of data collection supported by ICT. A specially designed web portal equipped with advanced alumni tracking and communication features was developed and used for alumni data collection. The web portal was evaluated after a period of real operation by analyzing collected data and conducting an online survey. The evaluation results showed that the web portal could be used as effective, efficient, and useful tool for alumni data collection and communication between alumni and higher education institutions.