Centre for Educational Technology: The Neglected Basic in Colleges of Education

Abstract

In view of the significance of centre for educational technology as the basis for teacher training programme in the colleges of education, precise understanding of the purpose of establishing the centre and its functions needs to be brought to the knowledge of the concern group. Therefore, this paper discusses the functions and uses of Centre for educational technology as well as educational technology as a discipline in colleges of education from the relevant literatures even though research on the centre is very scanty. Factors that lead to the non-proper use of the centre by both staff and students which include among other things, lack of adequate facilities, lack of expertise in managing the centre and non involvement of teachers in the utilization of centre by the management among other things was identified. The study consisted of 60 students from the 3 Departments of the Bauchi Institute for Arabic and Islamic studies and 65 teachers of the institute. The students sample for the study was randomly selected from the 547 NCE II students during the 2009/2010 academic session from these departments. The selection was done by dividing actual total population by 9 for fair representation from each of the department. i.e 547/9 = 60.7 Therefore, the researcher decided to picked the sample size of sixty (60) and administered the questionnaires to 20 students from each of the department at random. While for teachers since the population is fair and they are part and parcel of the study it was also decided to adopt it as it was i.e 65 making the total population of the study 125 respectively. Finally, frequency distribution and percentages was used in the analysis and discussion of data collected.