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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1.         BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

The impact of e-learning is increasingly dominating the current educational system as the impact of technology continuously dominates our day to day activities worldwide (Bass 2006). Especially governments of developing countries like Nigeria are convinced that their journey towards educational development is mainly dependent on technological support (MoE, 2005; Serbessa, 2006). For this, science and technology education is the primary target in which case tertiary education will come to the front. Electronic learning which is often regarded as the fundamental tool for education is then the basic primary element which needs a very serious support during the teaching-learning process in Nigerian tertiary institutions. This shows that the chain of interdependent relationships between development, technology, education and tertiary institutions in bringing the issue of the conceptual change in teaching and learning methodologies in other to improve students’ academic performances and achievement. This interdependent chain is cyclic such that education supports the growth of technology, while in return, technological facilities support educational system and by extension students academic performances. E-learning is simply regarded as the use of Information and Communication Technology e.g. Internet, Computer, Mobile phone, Learning Management System (LMS), Televisions, Radios and others to enhance teaching and learning activities. E-learning is a unifying term used to describe the fields of online learning, web-based training and technology delivered instructions (Oye , Salleh, & Iahad, 2010). E-learning approach has become an increasingly popular learning approach in higher educational institutions due to vast growth of internet technology. Nowadays E-learning has a competitive advantage and many tertiary institutions have implemented it and this has impacts on students’ academic performance or GPA. However, still there are other tertiary institutions and academic institutions that use very low interactive E-learning which is not enough to contribute to the performance of the students. In contrary to that, other higher educational institutions use highly interactive E-learning which directly improves students’ academic performance in general (Rodgers, 2008). Today, technology is a tool used to remove geographical barriers and facilitates everybody to learn anytime and anywhere without the presence of the lecturer. The main purpose of E-Learning is to increase accessibility of education and reducing costs and time as well as improving students’ academic performance. This approach of learning facilitates different students at different continents to attend the same classes almost at the same time. Nowadays, technology is becoming the medium for teaching and learning without being at tertiary institution campuses. This technology enabled instructional method is aimed to improve quality of education and student academic performance. It has been found that students in higher educational institutions that engaged in E-Learning, generally performed better than those in face to-face courses. (Holley, 2002) found that students who participate in online/ E-Learning achieve better grades than students who studied traditional approach. As result of this finding E- learning is growing very fast and become popular and that is why many higher educational institutions are adopting to virtual learning system. ELearning is widely used in many universities in the world today. In some universities, their E-learning does not add any value to the teaching and learning activities of the Tertiary institution and perhaps they do not investigate the impact of E-learning on student academic performance among Nigerian undergraduates.

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