Harnessing Digital Revolution for Technical Academic Performance: Context to Rurban Segment

摘要

Information sharing through technology has always democratized education, recently enabling more students from various strata to access the same resources and tools hence bringing a revolutionary transformation worldwide. It empowers students to enhance and broaden their academic acumen, latest research area exploration and assignments to be submitted during their academic pursuits. The research investigates pedagogical impacts of low-tariff internet availability for technical undergraduate students enrolled in engineering field in urban vicinity and rural segments of Bihar. It assesses the role of online tutorials, wikis, blogs, tweets, feeds, videos on YouTube as educational nodes, their reach to Rural areas and their roles in enhancing the academic performance of the students. The study also considers the procrastination attitude towards studies as risk associated with Internet overuse. It evaluates whether anytime-anywhere Internet availability increases or decrements students' performance in urban areas and percentage uninterrupted accessibility of internet in engineering colleges of rural areas. The methodology adopted was a cross sectional study conducted on Engineering pursuing students for three sessions 2011-14; 2013-2016 and 2015-2018 primarily to mark the exponential decrease in tariff upon the capacity of internet consumption in India. The online Questionnaire instrument was circulated to Alumni Connect platform for passed out students and ERP mode for current students of city based institution and face-to-face mode in rural organization. The CGPA of sampled students were recorded from Examination Department tabulations. Dependency on internet for academic accolades were evaluated and tested for correlation with reference to gender, economic capacity, usage, course coverage for sampled 2200 students (State-Aided, Private and State Govt. Engg. Colleges). The statistical results portrayed that 71% of the respondents were hostel residents and accessed internet for multiple purposes. Around 79.2% were identified as using internet for classroom teaching supplements and 68.3% used for document downloads like quizzes, assignments. Internet Access of 6 -8 hours were observed to have higher CGPA with p = 0.011 probability value indicating that students with high internet usage with consistent speed improve upon their academic performance with higher grades.