The Use Of The Internet By Students Of Presbyterian University College

Abstract

The use of Internet has become integral to accessing information by students. This study sought to do a comparative study on the use of the Internet by postgraduates and final year undergraduates of Presbyterian University College. The study compares students’ awareness and use of some selected Internet resources, their perceptions on the ease of use of Internet, their perception on the usefulness of Internet to their academic work, their attitude towards Internet use, their knowledge on Internet search strategies as well as challenges they encountered with its use. The study employed the cross sectional survey and a stratified simple random sampling was used in selecting 200 respondents from the total student population of 1020. Major findings of the study showed that, postgraduates were generally older adults between the ages of 40.-50 whilst the undergraduates were younger adults between the ages of 21-30. Google and Google Scholar were found to be the Internet resources mostly known and used for academic work by both groups of students with less use of the University’s subscribed e-resources and Institutional Repository. The responses from the students also indicated that both groups of students lacked knowledge on effective Internet search strategies such as the Boolean Logic. Although the students generally perceived the Internet to be useful, postgraduates did not perceive the use of Internet to be easy. Attitude towards Internet use by the postgraduates was negative compared to the final year undergraduates. Major challenges of Internet use included slow Internet speed, difficulty in finding the needed information and information overload, high cost of Internet, lack of wireless Internet and inadequate computers in the University Library and restriction of access to the ICT lab. Recommendations made include increasing awareness and use of subscribed e-resources (academic database), mounting a course on Information Retrieval on the Internet (search strategies), increasing the number of computers and installation of wireless Internet in the library, an investment in Internet Bandwidth, provision of hands-on training for students on how to search for information so that students can effectively make use of the Internet for their academic work