Digital Divide and Online Instruction Delivery Readiness Among Nigerian Universities in an Era of COVID-19

Abstract

This study on the digital divide and online instructional delivery readiness among universities in Nigeria employed the descriptive survey research design. Six universities were selected in South-South, Nigeria. These include two federal, two-state, and two privately-owned universities. The selected universities are the University of Calabar, University of Benin, (federally owned), River State University of Science and Technology; Cross River University of Technology (state universities) and Arthur Jarvis University, Akpabuyo and Benson Idahosa University Benin City (private universities) all in South-South Zone, Nigeria. Three faculties were selected from each university. These include Education, Science and Social Sciences. Different departments were randomly selected within each of the selected faculties. The population of the study was 10,274 undergraduate students during the 2020 academic session. A random sampling procedure was employed to choose undergraduates from all levels in the selected departments using a sampling percentage of 20% to give a sample size of 2,596. The instrument for data collection was a questionnaire. The questionnaire collected data on demography, availability of ICT infrastructure, staff and students ICT skills, factors deepening the divide, and online instruction readiness of universities. Data collected were analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Science version 23 (SPSS) to get frequency and percentages. The results from the analyses reveal that a greater percentage of the students are highly proficient in ICT skills, private universities had more ICTs than public universities, and it was also though private universities were ready, the sampled public universities were not technically ready for online instructional delivery.