ASSESSING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF ICT TOOLS AMONG THE ACADEMIC RESEARCH SCHOLARS THROUGH A PCA-BASED INDEX DEVELOPMENT APPROACH

ICTs, as is evident from the post-COVID-19 situation, have become a major facilitator in the dissemination of quality educational content for various institutions. Yet, the effectiveness of the ICT tools concerning the various dimensions needs to be studied to gain fruitful insight into the determinants of effectiveness of ICT tools. For this purpose, an ex post facto study taking into purview the situation, was undertaken for the 179 academic research scholars in two state agricultural universities namely Dr. PDKV, Akola in Maharashtra and IGKV, Raipur. A novel ICT effectiveness index was developed following the Principal Components analysis approach. The results revealed that readability of content (4.454), ease of handling ICT tools (4.317) and communication skills of the presenter (3.941) were the major determinants of the effectiveness of ICT tools. Further 39.65 per cent and 32.96 per cent of the research scholars perceived the effectiveness of ICT tools to be “very high” and “high” respectively. Most scholars perceived the effectiveness to be very high in terms of content quality (50.84%) followed by 45.81% (in terms of communication efficacy). Thus, overall effectiveness was high but efforts can be made towards improvement of presentation quality which was perceived to be high by 43.02 per cent which was comparatively lower against the other two components of effectiveness.