MANAGING HIGHER EDUCATION AND DIGITAL READINESS OF LECTURERS IN UNIVERSITIES IN CROSS RIVER STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

This study aimed at assessing managing Higher Education and digital readiness of lecturers in public universities in Cross River State. To achieve this purpose, two research questions were formulated as a guide to the study. A cross-sectional survey research design was adopted for the study. The simple random sampling technique which was used to select 235 academic staff was alsoadopted for this study. The instrument used for data collection was an adapted questionnairetitled: Managing Higher Education and Lecturers’ Digital Readiness Questionnaire (MHELDRQ). Data collected were subjected to statistical analysis using descriptive statistics ofmeans and standard deviation of the statistical package for social science (SPSS) version 25, and the results are presented in the respective tables. The results revealed that digital tools for managing student records, enrolments, and financial transactions, streamlining administrative processes have been deployed and there is a centralised data centre equipped with high-capacity servers and secure storage solutions to support the efficient storage and retrieval of academic and administrative data.However, lack of digital infrastructure, financial resources for data subscription as well as interrupted power supply amongst several others pose as constraints to the digital readiness of lecturers to teach, research and serve the community.