ABSTRACT

The study was carried out to determine the competency requirements of Business Education lecturers for effective information and communications technology (ICT) application in Colleges of Education in Enugu State, Nigeria. The research adopted descriptive survey research design. Four research questions and four hypotheses guided the study. The population of the study comprised the 64 Business Education lecturers in federal, state and private colleges of education Enugu State, Nigeria. There was no sampling because the population of the study was manageable. Thus the study made use of  the entire population of the study. The instrument for data collection was a structured questionnaire titled Competency Requirements for Information and Communications Technology Application in Business Education Questionnaire (CONFICTABEDQ). The instrument was validated by three experts-two in Business Education and one in Measurement and Evaluation. The reliability coefficient values obtained were .75, .80, .87 and .72 for clusters 1-4, respectively and the overall reliability index was .70. A total of 60 copies of the questionnaire were returned and data were analysed using mean with standard deviation for answering the research questions and t-test for the testing of the hypotheses. The result showed that Business Education lecturers in colleges of education required technical, pedagogical, administrative and attitudinal competencies for effective ICT application. The four null hypotheses indicate no significant difference opinion between male and female Business Education lecturers. Thus, recommendations were made based on the findings including the massive in-service training programme for Business Education lecturers using every means available to them such as seminars, workshops, on-the-job training and retraining programmes, on-campus study leave to enable them engage in ICT training.