A comparative study of the development of information technology in higher education worldwide with an emphasis on Iranian higher education system

Subject Areas : Educational Science

mohammad rahmanpour ¹ , M.J leyagatdar ² , ابراهیم Afshar ³

1 - دانشجوی کارشناسی ارشد برنامه‌ریزی آموزشی دانشگاه اصفهان
2 - عضو هیئت علمی گروه علوم تربیتی دانشگاه اصفهان
3 - عضو هیئت علمی گروه کتابداری و اطلاع رسانی دانشگاه اصفهان

Received: 2016-01-01 Accepted : 2016-01-01 Published : 2009-05-22

Keywords: Iran, Information Technology, Higher Education, challenge, world,

Abstract :

The development of IT has had a serious impact on higher education in the twentieth century. This development has been noticeable in higher education systems worldwide. Realizing its importance, Iranians have taken significant steps. However, Iranian education system faces serious challenges in developing the technology more. While studying the status of IT development in the world, the present study aims to elaborate on the challenges in terms of cultural-social and human resource dimensions. The statistical population of the study includes the members of the faculty in some state universities. The universities are the University of Kordestan, ShirazUniversity, AlameTabatabayiUniversity, TehranUniversity, Sharif technical University, EsfehanTechnicalUniversity. They were randomly selected. 150 members were selected through randomized, stratified method to answer a questionnaire. It was a researcher-made questionnaire. The validity of the instrument was approves by a number of scholars. Its reliability was established through Cronbach alpha to be 0.97. SPSS was employed to analyze the data. The results showed that in the cultural-social dimension, high ratio of student numbers to the number of personal computers at universities, the lack of research interest among students, and lack of English knowledge among students and teachers were the major challenges. In the human resource dimension, inability of students and to some extent the teachers to access information in existing databases was the major challenge.