Islamic Studies and Private Universities in South-West Nigeria: Challenges and Prospects

Islamic Studies is one of the core and pertinent courses offered and taught at both private and public universities in Nigeria. The subject prepared its graduates to have potentialities, capabilities man power in teaching, administration, politics, economic, legislation and judiciary in Nigeria. Despite these significant contributions, the subject has confronted with a lot of deprivations in the enrollment of students, recruitment of staff and availability of physical and instructional materials. Based on these, the paper therefore, intends to explore the teaching and learning of Islamic studies in the south west Nigeria private universities, identify problems facing its teaching and learning and proffer solutions to these predicaments. The methodology adopted is analytical with information from both oral interview and written sources from libraries in Nigeria. Among the findings of the study are that the Subject-Islamic studies needs more experts to teach its core courses in private universities in Nigeria and students who wish to enroll for the subject should have rudiments of the discipline before admission.   

Use of E-Journals by Faculty of University of the Punjab

The study aimed to investigate academic staff’s use patterns of e-journals. It also investigated relative use of e-journals by academic staff of twelve disciplines and disciplinary differences in the use patterns of e-journals. Relationship between frequency of e-journals’ use and demographic and professional variables of interest were determined. The reasons of under-utilisation of Higher Education Commission (HEC) e-journals were also explored. To achieve the objectives of the study, a quantitative design was used based on survey method. The survey instrument was a self-administered questionnaire constructed with the help of related literature. The questionnaire was pre-tested and reliability was established measuring Cronbach’s Alpha. University of the Punjab was chosen as a sample and targeted population comprised academic staff serving on contract and permanent basis at Quaid-e-Azam and Allama Iqbal campuses of Lahore. The targeted population of the University of the Punjab at the time of data collection was 949 academic staff members. The questionnaire was personally distributed to 841 academic staff members of twelve disciplines with the assistance of information professionals of the respective departments. The questionnaire could not distribute to 108 academic staff members as they were on leave. The number of respondents who returned the questionnaires was 457 and an overall response rate of the survey 54 % was achieved. The data collected through questionnaires was entered in SPSS programme and cleaned before data analysis. Descriptive and non-parametric statistics were applied to analyse data quantitatively. The findings of the study revealed that academic staff’s top most used information sources were e-journals, online reference sources and discussion with colleagues. Majority of the academic staff used e-journals more for research and keeping up-to-date activities than teaching and writing conference papers. Majority of the academic staff identified e-journal articles by employing searching method. An overwhelming majority of the academic staff accessed general search engines, Google Scholar and open access e-journal websites to find e-journals and articles as compared to HEC e-journals and full-text databases. Majority of the academic staff frequently used title words followed by keyword searching as a search strategy to retrieve articles. The frequency of e-journal’s use was found related to age, education level, Internet use, e-literacy skills, purposes of using e-journals and their respective disciplines. Gender and academic designation were not found related to the academic staff’s frequency of e-journal’s use. The top most barriers faced by academic staff in accessing, searching and downloading e-journal articles were payment of e-journal articles not available through HEC e-journals and slow internet speed. HEC subscribed e-journals were found to be useful to academic staff teaching and research activities. Academic staff was aware of HEC e-journals relevant to their subject and e-journals were also easily accessible to them. The reasons of under-use of HEC e-journals might be non-availability of full-text articles, lack of training programmes about the use of HEC databases and e-journals, academic staff’s lack of good advanced searching skills and on-campus restricted access to e-journals. It is concluded from key findings of the study that academic staff preferred e-journals as a prime means of information source than all print, electronic and informal sources for their scholarly activities. Academic staff has become aware of HEC e-journals in their relevant disciplines, but payment of e-journal articles not available through HEC e-journals is a major barrier faced by academic staff. HEC e-journals are not fully meeting the core e-journals demand of academic staff. The major recommendations made were that workshops and e-literacy instruction programmes should be arranged for academic staff by information professionals to teach the use of advanced searching techniques to retrieve articles. Awareness programmes should be arranged by Punjab University Library about British Document Delivery System of HEC National Digital Library Programme for requesting e-journal articles.