Use of Internet resources in higher education: A case of Faculty of Arts of the University of Cape Coast, Ghana

Abstract

Purpose: To determine whether faculty and students utilise the Internet resources for teaching, learning and research activities and to ascertain the challenges of accessing the Internet. Methodology: The study made use of 119 students and 56 lecturers. Proportionate stratified sampling design was used. Here, the main strata of the population for the study was gender. At each level a specific number of students were selected for the study. The selection was made to incorporate 58.3% male and 41.7% female representation to reflect the sex composition of the entire population. The analysis was done using IBM Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20. Findings: The study revealed that most of the respondents were aware that the Internet has resources that could be used for scholarly work; however some of them could not access the resources due to lack of adequate searching skills. It also came to light that most of the respondents accessed the internet at home and on their laptops since the departments had inadequate internet resources Originally: The teaching of Information Literacy Skills at the tertiary level means that faculty and students are exposed to the sources of information in print and non-print format. The uniqueness of this study is that it examines how respondents integrated Internet searching skills into the curriculum of the university.