Interactive Digital Classroom Tools and Effective Instructional Delivery in Rivers State Owned Universities

Abstract

The study investigated educational management lecturers' utilization of interactive digital classroom tools for effective instructional delivery in Rivers State owned universities, with attention to piazza, the interactive whiteboard and interactive video conferencing. Three research questions and three null hypotheses guided the study. The descriptive survey research design was adopted. The population of the study comprised 85 lecturers in the Department of Educational Management, consisting of 43 lecturers in Rivers State University and 42 lecturers in Ignatius Ajuru University of Education, and the entire population was studied without sampling owing to its small and manageable size. The instrument for data collection was a questionnaire tagged "Lecturers' Utilization of Digital Classroom Tools for Effective Instructional Delivery Questionnaire", structured on the four-point summated rating scale response options of very high extent, high extent, low extent and very low extent. The face and content validity of the questionnaire was established by three experts in Educational Management and in Measurement and Evaluation, and its reliability was determined through the test-retest method, with the Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient yielding a reliability index of 0.80. All 85 copies of the questionnaire administered were retrieved and used for the study. Mean and standard deviation were used to answer the research questions while the z-test was used to test the null hypotheses at the 0.05 level of significance. The study found that lecturers' utilization of piazza, the interactive whiteboard and interactive video conferencing enhances effective instructional delivery to a high extent, with aggregate mean scores of 2.77 and 2.71, 2.74 and 2.73, and 2.76 and 2.77 respectively, and that lecturers in the two universities did not differ significantly in their ratings on any of the three tools. It was recommended among others that departments should adopt a discussion platform such as piazza for every course, so that questions raised outside the lecture period receive timely response.