1887

n Mousaion - Assessment of the problems postgraduate students face in accessing e-resources at Makerere University, Uganda : a comparison between education and LIS students

Volume 29, Issue 2
  • ISSN : 0027-2639
USD

 

Abstract

Technology has become an integral part of higher education learning. With increased usage of instructional technology, web-based instructional resources such as electronic textbooks, journals, reviews and bulletins are making their way into the higher education system (Njagi, Smith & Isabell 2003; Okello-Obura & Magara 2008). In order to better understand the situation at Makerere University, a study was carried out on the e-resources-seeking behaviour of LIS postgraduate students and was subsequently published (Okello-Obura & Ikoja-Odongo 2010). With a view to drawing more lessons, a similar study was commissioned for postgraduate students in education at the same university. The objectives of the study were to: determine the knowledge or skills that postgraduate education students have as regards e-information access; establish the problems postgraduate education students face in accessing e-information resources; compare the level of skills for e-resources utilisation and problems faced by LIS and postgraduate education students; and recommend appropriate measures to address the problems facing e-resources access at Makerere University.


The study used a structured questionnaire for data collection, and convenience sampling was used to select the participants. To ensure a fair comparison, the same number of LIS students and education students were selected to participate. To provide uniformity in the study, both first and second-year postgraduate students were considered alongside LIS postgraduate students. The findings show that the respondents have positive attitudes towards e-resources utilisation. The problems identified by both groups of students include: slow Internet connectivity; inadequately networked computers; lack of access to low-cost printers in the library; inability to use advanced search strategies on most databases; and a lack of awareness of most of the e-resources. The study recommends that the speed of Internet connectivity should be improved by acquiring more bandwidth - or that a better option should be explored through the University Directorate of ICTs; lecturers should enforce the use of e-resources among postgraduate students, low-cost printing services should be provided in all postgraduate students' laboratories and dedicated to printing only online resources; awareness campaigns among both lecturers and postgraduate students should be intensified; and implementation of a phone text alert system should be explored with a friendly telecommunications company in the country. The findings of these studies will help library planners, LIS educators and education lecturers to consider ways to improve on e-resources access and utilisation. It is hoped that it will provoke new thinking towards improving the situation at the university library.

Loading full text...

Full text loading...

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/mousaion/29/2/EJC124918
2011-01-01
2017-10-17

This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a Success
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error
http://journals.co.za/content/mousaion/29/2/EJC124918
journals.co.za
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-43
56484
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:ZUPXNOVNA5TF2UCLMUTUBV37TLGZNATG
<urn:uuid:15f43ae5-a929-441e-83bc-1a38703f7689>
2017-10-17T11:57:28Z
104.25.233.108
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:L6XTTVJR4P2UWU4XSXXT3IIWBE3ZKJDD
<urn:uuid:8f43733f-16c1-49dc-bef5-0a74431fc550>
http://journals.co.za/content/mousaion/29/2/EJC124918
length
response
<urn:uuid:8393349f-4b2d-4b5c-b99a-67a01a4f7945>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-71-180-189.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-43
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for October 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf