Impacts Of ICT On Ubiquitous Use Of Chatbots Among Students in Public Higher Educational Institutions in Nigeria

Abstract

This paper of ICT on ubiquitous use of chatbots in public higher educational institutions in Nigeria. University of Port Harcourt River State is among the public tertiary education institutions in Nigeria. Population of this study is 11,000 which comprised 5,000 males and 6,000 female students from University of Port Harcourt River State. Stratified random sampling technique was used to select 35 male respondents in three departments from the faculty of education. On the other hand, 40 female students were selected from three departments in the faculty of management sciences, all from university of Port Harcourt river State. This gave a sample size of 225. Descriptive survey research design was used for this study. Two research questions guided this study. Instrument used for data collection was researcher developed questionnaire “titled, impacts of ICT on ubiquitous use of chatbots in public higher educational institutions in Nigeria” was used, with four rating scale of strongly agree, agree, dis agree and strongly disagree. The instrument was validated by two specialists from Imo state University Owerri. Cronbach alpha statistics was used to determine the reliability coefficient of this study at 0.78 and 0.97, which shows that the instrument is reliable to be used for this study. Mean scores were used to analyze the data. The finding from this study reveals that there are varied challenges on use of ICT in public higher education institutions in Nigeria. The challenges include: Inadequate funding for provision of ICT facilities by federal government frequent power outage, inability of some students to embrace change with ICT among others.   It was recommended for this study that government should provide adequate funding to public higher education institutions in Nigeria.

 Keywords: Modern Age Students, Uses of ICT in Hybrid learning, Modern World with Artificial Intelligence, Meaning of Chatbots, Impacts of Chatbots in Teaching and Learning.