PERCEPTION, ATTITUDE AND READINESS TOWARDS ONLINE LEARNING AMONG COLLEGES OF EDUCATION PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS IN KATSINA STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

This study examined the perception, attitude and readiness towards online learning among College of Education pre-service teachers in Katsina State, Nigeria. The study adopted a descriptive cross-sectional survey design. The population for this study comprises 2,300 NCE pre-service teachers from Colleges of Education in Katsina State. Using simple random sampling, 230 NCE I & II pre-service teachers were selected for the study. Six research questions and three hypotheses guided the study. The research instrument for this study was a structured questionnaire on pre-service teachers’ Perception, Attitude and Readiness towards Online Learning Questionnaire (PAROLQ). The reliability of the instrument was 0.95, 0.86, and 0.78 for perception, attitudes and readiness online learning respectively. The data on research question collected were analyzed using Mean, Standard Deviation while those on hypotheses were tested using Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) with the aid of Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20. The findings of the study showed that pre-service teachers of college of education have positive perception towards online learning. Pre-service teachers of college of education have positive attitudes towards online learning. Pre-service teachers of college of education are ready to adopt online learning. There is a significant difference in the perception of online learning between the male and female respondents and the significant difference was in favour of female respondents. The result revealed that there was a significant difference in the mean score of male and female pre-service teachers’ towards online learning. F (1,226) = 38.488, p<0.05. Pre-service teachers’ attitude towards online learning was not influenced by their gender. Based on the findings, it was recommended that National Commission for Colleges of Education should encourage the use of online learning by the Federal, State and Local Government for pre-service teachers and that the school authorities should embrace the use of online learning in teaching in order to enhance positive perception, attitude and readiness of pre-service teachers on the use of online learning in Nigeria.