University Insights: Collaborators and syncers

Welcome to the third post in our Dropbox University Insights series. In these posts, we’ll take aggregated usage data* from Dropbox users at universities around the world, and surface interesting trends. Welcome back, data lovers! Our last post explored which schools around the world are working the most with creative files and developer files. This week, we’re going to take a look at which students are the most collaborative, and which ones are syncing their files to the most devices. Collaborators Some students create files just for their own use, while others share their files left and right to get feedback, edits, and contribute to group products. We call these students the “collaborators.” To get the ranking, we looked at the average number of collaborators per student at each school — in other words, which schools have students who are the most connected to other students at their university through shared folders. Here are the universities where collaborators are most prominent:

1. Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz (Austria)
2. Tel Aviv University (Israel)
3. Universität Konstanz (Germany)
4. Technische Universität Hamburg-Harburg (Germany)
5. Universität Stuttgart (Germany)

Germany and Austria seem to be the biggest collaborators, with 13 of the global top 20 most collaborative schools: eight in Germany, and five in Austria. Israel is not far behind, with three out of the global top 20. Syncers Next we looked at “syncers,” which is the name we give users who are accessing their files in lots of different ways — via the web or desktop app on their computers and laptops, and the mobile app on smartphones and tablets. For this group, we looked at which schools have the highest percentage of users who are using their Dropbox accounts on at least two devices. Here are the top syncer schools globally:

1. Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (South Korea)
2. Universitat de les Illes Balears (Spain)
3. Seoul National University (South Korea)
4. Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (Netherlands)
5. Yonsei University (South Korea)

The top 20 list for syncer schools is dominated by Korean and Spanish universities: Six of the top 20 are in South Korea, and eight of the top 20 are in Spain. And the top 13 schools have an average of over 60% of active users marked as multi-platform. Our final University Insights post is coming up next week, where we’ll take a look at shutterbugs and linguists — students with the most photos, and files in different languages. Don’t miss it! And if you haven’t already, sign up for Campus Cup before December 14, 2015 to earn extra Dropbox space. *Data from September 2014 – August 2015