Improving Access and Quality in Teachers’ Professional Development Using Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Federal College of Education (Technical), Gombe

Abstract

The survey research design was adopted in this study which examined Information and Communication Technology (ICT) competence and how this competence can be used to improve access and quality in teachers’ professional development. Five research questions were used to guide the study and a questionnaire was developed, validated and used for data collection from a sample size of 400 academic staff, 300 were returned and analyzed. The collected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics (percentages), and plotted in column chart. The results show that majority of the academic staff have laptops; access to internet was mainly at public cyber café; majority (24.7% and 36%) rated their ICT competence as ‘not competent’ and ‘somewhat competent’, that is, fairly competent. Inadequate ICT facilities, excess work load and funding were identified as major challenges to ICT usage among academic staff. Recommendations made include funding of ICT training of academic staff by the management of the institutions and making ICT training mandatory for all academic staff.