Information and Communication Technologies Usage among Agricultural Students of Tertiary Institutions in Southwest of Nigeria

Abstract

The study examined information and communication technologies usage among agricultural students of tertiary institution in Southwest of Nigeria. Multistage sampling procedure was used to select 300 agricultural students from tertiary institutions. Structured questionnaire was employed to elicit information on students’ socioeconomic characteristics, availability of ICTs, accessibility and purposes of ICTs usage. Data were subjected to percentage, chi-square, the Pearson Product Moment Correlation and the Analysis of variance at p=0.05. Findings revealed that the most available ICTs among students were internet and mobile phone (95.0%) respectively
while they had access to mobile phone (Weighted Mean (WM)=0.58) and radio (WM=0.51), they used ICTs for information (WM=0.77), academics (WM=0.70) and entertainment (WM=0.70) purposes; with high level of availability (71.0%), access (56.7%) and ICTs usage purpose (51.3%) respectively. There were significant relationships between respondents’ monthly stipend (r=0.200), state of institution (χ²=8.000), religion (χ²=222.660), marital status (χ²=211.680), category of students’ programme (χ²= 320.4608), type of institution (χ²=56.000) and their purposes for using ICTs but with a significant difference across the states (F=23.821; p=0.00). Students used ICTs for information, academic and entertainment purposes based on their age and type of their institutions. Since ICTs are used for beneficial purposes, it is recommended that ICTs should be adapted, applied and incorporated into tertiary institutions’ curricula across the nation.

Keywords: ICTs usage, undergraduate students, entertainment purposes, mobile phone, tertiary institutions.