SOURCE:

Faculty: Education
Department: Vocational Education

CONTRIBUTORS:

Soneye, G.M;
Ezenwafor, J.I;

ABSTRACT:

Globally, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have become inseparable entities in all aspect of human life. The use of ICT has fundamentally changed the practices and procedures of nearly all forms of endeavour. This has made it one of the basic building blocks of the modern society. Although ICT resources have been looked upon as tools for the upliftment of the standard of education in developed countries, the level of compliance in implementing the ICT resources in instructional development process leaves much to be desired in Nigerian higher education system. Recent developments in ICT have drastically affected educational procedure for improved quality of education offered to students. The need to ensure this quality in business education necessitated this study on extent of utilization of ICT resources and its perceived contributions to business education in South-West Nigeria. Four research questions guided the study while six null hypotheses were tested. Descriptive survey design was adopted for the study. Population was 553 lecturers and students and the sample size was 302. A validated questionnaire containing 51 items was used for data collection. The reliability coefficients of the four sections of the instrument were 0.85, 0.82, 0.75 and 0.86 using Cronbach Alpha Reliability Coefficient. Arithmetic mean and standard deviation were used to analyze the data relative to the research questions while Z-test was adopted to test the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. It was found that extent of utilization of ICT resources by students and lecturers were low in business education programme. It was further found that gender did not significantly influence the mean rating of respondents on the six areas covered but status and institution ownership did in some. Based on the findings, it was concluded that ICT resources were utilized at a low extent in business education programme of universities in the area of study. It was recommended among others that management of the universities should support lecturers of business education to engage in retraining programmes to enhance their competences for effective utilization of ICT resources in order to equip the graduates with relevant competences for the 21th century global labour market.