ASSESSMENT OF ICT COMPETENCIES AND USE OF ELECTRONIC INFORMATION RESOURCES BY LECTURERS IN UNIVERSITIES IN BENUE STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

The research was conducted to assess ICT competencies of lecturers in Universities of Benue State in related to the utilization of electronic information resources. Two research objectives were formulated to complete the research which were types of electronic information resources available in the universities and the level of ICT competencies possessed by the lecturers for using electronic information resources. Quantitative research method was adopted by using a cross-sectional survey research design. The population of the study consisted of lecturers in the three universities in Benue State; namely, University of Mkar, Mka; Benue State University, Makurdi; and Federal University of Agriculture, Makurdi, with a total of 1, 537 lecturers. Out of this population, 306 lecturers were drawn as sample for the study. Cluster and simple random sampling were preferred for sample selection. Questionnaire was used as the instrument for data collection. To establish the validity of the instrument, the questionnaire was presented to experts for face and content validity. Reliability of the instrument was obtained through the pilot study conducted in Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. A reliability level of 0.98 was obtained. The data collected from the respondents was sorted, organized, presented and analyzed using descriptive statistics for the research questions while inferential statistics in form of One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was maximized in testing the null hypothesis at 0.05 level of significance, with the aid of SPSS. The study revealed that electronic journals, online databases, and e-books are the most available electronic information resources, and the level of ICT competencies of lecturers in universities in Benue State is high in basic knowledge and skills like word processing, PowerPoint presentation, and Internet surfing. The study recommends that the management of respective university libraries in Benue State should engage IT experts to develop Digital Institutional Repositories (DIR) for their institutions in order to provide sustainable access to relevant scholarly outputs in addition to the available ones, and government at all levels should show more commitment to the development of ICT competencies of lecturers by making available ICT grants to the universities and lecturers on annual basis.