Abstract:

This study was designed to find out the difficulties that students and study centres face during electronic examination in National Open University of Nigeria(NOUN).It was a survey design with three research questions to guide the study. The population for the study was all the students of National Open University of Nigeria. Study centre directors, student counselors, administrative officers, librarians, and information technology (IT) network administrators in the study centres also formed the population for the study. Two hundred (200) students were selected on School basis from each of the selected study centres, using the stratified random sampling technique. Twelve (12) study centres were selected by stratified random sampling technique from the sixty-one (61) study centres in the country, two from each geopolitical zone. Two questionnaires (A and B) were developed for the study. Questionnaire A was for the students while B was for the staff of the study centres. The reliability of the questionnaires was established using Cronbach Alpha formula. The reliability was 0.75 for questionnaire A and 0.78 for questionnaire B. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data. Findings reveal that the greatest difficulties encountered by students with regards to e-examination in NOUN are -waiting for long hours to secure a computer system for the e-examination, frequent changes in the examination time-table and problems of logging in during the examination. Conducting e-examinations with inadequate number of computer systems for a large population of students, low computer literacy level of the students and poor infrastructural facilities constitute the greatest difficulties for the study centres. Based on the findings, it was recommended among others that NOUN should provide the study centres with adequate number of computer systems to match the students’ population; also the software for the e-examination should be tried out before using it for the entire university examination.

Keywords:

National Open University of Nigeria, E-Examination, Study Centre.