Attitude of LIS Postgraduate Students Towards Remote Teaching and Learning at Post-COVID -19 Era in Nigerian Private Universities: Issues and Prospects

The outbreak of Coronavirus in the year 2019 underscored the importance and inherent benefits of remote teaching and learning in university education. The private universities in Nigeria took the lead in deploying teaching and learning tools to bridge the gap that ought to have been created by the lockdown. Despite the inherent benefits, the context observation of the researcher indicated that the Library and Information Science (LIS) postgraduate students maintain a lacklustre disposition towards the use of these tools in the post-COVID-19 era owing to factors associated with poor internet facility, convenience, structure, training, insufficient bandwidth, and little preparation. It is in light of this, that the study examined their attitude towards the use of remote teaching and learning in post COVID-19 era in Nigerian private universities. The study adopted a quantitative approach with a survey design. Its population included 150 students in the three private universities offering the LIS postgraduate programmes in South-West Nigeria. The data for the study were gathered in May-June, 2023 data was analysed with frequency, percentage, and standard deviation and the hypothesis was tested with linear regression at a 0.05 level of significance. The findings revealed that Zoom, Google Classroom, and Microsoft Teams were the most available tools in these universities. The results further indicated that attitudinal factors (cognitive, affective and behavioural) have a positive and significant influence on the use of remote teaching and learning during the post-COVID-19 era by LIS postgraduate students in the studied private universities in South-West Nigeria.