Information Technology and Web Use Characteristics of Nigerian Private Universities

The different uses of the Internet by a university to provide and access appropriate web content define the university's Web characteristics. Studies of the Information Technology (IT) and Web characteristics of Nigerian universities so far have focused mostly on public universities. This study, therefore, evaluated the information technology (IT) and Internet availability, and the inclinations of academics to use Internet based outlets to access and disseminate research, in three purposively-selected Nigerian private universities. Observation, website analysis and questionnaire survey were used to collect data, with. One hundred and twelve (37.3%) of the academic staff participating in the questionnaire survey. The study examined two web impact factors (WIF) - size and content of, and links received by, the universities' websites. The study found that IT and the Internet were readily available to academics in the universities. With regards to the WIF, however, only Babcock University had the right form of domain, although it had no in-links. Bells University of Technology had only one in-link, while Covenant University had five. The websites featured mostly non-academic contents, and none of them was linked by websites of other Nigerian universities. The academic staff used more web resources than they produced, as over 90% of them had downloaded research resources from the web, but less than 8 % of them had published their research on the web. The universities need to understand conventional global requirements for the development and deployment of websites and web resources in order to develop the web content and use characteristics that would improve their web presence and visibility.