Internet uses in University courses Essay

The research by Wang (2007) discusses the issue of internet use specifically by lecturers in a university setting. The researchers examined three research questions in their study. The first was to determine whether or not professors in universities were effectively utilizing the internet as an instructional aid. The second was to assess the extent to which the internet is being used in such settings and the last was to analyze how students perceive the use of internet in the classroom by lecturers. The study involved a total of 624 students registered in the three major colleges of a single university in the Pacific Rim of the U. S. This was at a public university and the respondents were from both sexes, 62% of whom were females. These students also represented a cross-section of areas of study in education, business and the arts and sciences. The instrument used to collect data was a questionnaire designed by the researchers. For each item on the questionnaire the respondents were required to produce their response based on a 1-5 Likert scale. The statistical package SPSS Â ® was used as the data analysis tool. The researchers obtained descriptive statistics of the data using primarily the means. Based on the means produced from the students’ responses the researchers determine that the internet is not being effectively used by lecturers in university classrooms and that where such use existed it was not wide-spread. Additionally the researchers add that lecturers were far more comfortable to allow students to utilize this resource independently and made little attempt to facilitate students’ usage of the internet or incorporate such into the classroom. The implications of this finding are that university lecturers will need to get training in the different tools that the internet has to offer so that they can more effectively incorporate them into their classroom. In addition there is the suggestion that students are more capable than professors in manipulating these tools and thus lecturers need to update themselves. One strength of the study is that it involved the views of students from a cross-section of majors so that it gave a more rounded view of internet use across the university and was not limited to certain areas of study. However there is need to have a more broad-based analysis of the internet usage situation across multiple universities in different regions of the U. S. so as to determine if geographical or other factors are a hindrance to usage. Furthermore the survey depended solely on the views of students and did not take into consideration what the lecturers themselves felt. It would be useful to get their views to see if what the students report conforms to that of the lecturers. References Wang, Y. (2007, April). Internet uses in University courses. International Journal of E-Learning, 6(2), 279-292.