Wednesday, May 6, 2020
Beyond Quality and Accessibility System â⬠Free Samples to Students
Question: Discuss about the Beyond Quality and Accessibility System. Answer: Introduction The growth of technology, as well as the evolution of technology in the modern world, has arguably brought a great impact in different sectors among them been the education sectors. Studies have shown that technology has greatly influenced the students information seeking behaviors (Mills et al. 2014, p.327). Before then, many of academic research in institutions of higher learning were done under university libraries and were considered to be traditional methods of research. With advancement in technology or with increased technological change students information seeking behavior has greatly changed. Information seeking habits helps us to understand who needs what kind of information, why he needs the information, how the information would be found as well as the understanding of how the information will be evaluated and used by the students. It also explains the way people seek for and utilize information. This study will, therefore, provide an understanding of the impact or effec ts of information technology on information seeking behavior of individual students in the selected case of Holmes College. The Holmes Community College is an educational institution that was established in 1963. The institution is committed to providing the highest quality education to enable and empower its students to self-improvement irrespective of their gender, nationality or belief (Tahira Ameen, 2016, p. 111). The institution has continued to enjoy over 50 years of education excellence through developing from one level to the other. The success has regarding educational resource development has grown due to changes in technology that has had a great impact on information seeking behavior of the students. To understand the impact of the technological changes to students information seeking behavior, it is important to get an understanding of factors that give rise to a student perception of need of information, the factors that affect individuals perception for need as well as the understanding of the processes or actions involved in that response. Understanding the information needs of the studen ts in Holmes Community College calls for an individual student need across all disciplines, for instance, the information needs of a scientists student in the institution were found to vary from the information needs of a social scientist or humanities student. The information needs of the students dictated their information seeking behavior. An information need is an individual, groups or in this case a students desire to locate and obtain some useful information to satisfy their conscious or unconscious needs. Therese needs may be to research on given assignments, to obtain general knowledge about a certain topic or subject of interest, to establish whether some information is available or not, to improve their competencies in different fields and to get to understand the current issues (Zhang, 2014, p. 916). However, the student information seeking behavior is greatly influenced by their information need as well as their usage of the information. The revolution of the student information seeking behavior in Holmes Community College began with the use of library sources for information materials where students could search for this information from journals, periodicals, newspaper articles and other publications in the libraries. However, the amount of data required and the demand for more and new publications rose as t he existing ones could not meet the students or researchers demands as they were deemed insufficient and unreliable (Shah, 2014, p. 222). For instance, the information seeking behavior of a social scientist student from the institution showed that these types of students frequently visited their libraries daily and their preferred research method was through indexing and abstracting periodicals as well as citations in articles. The understanding and experience of information technology were limited to the institution in the last decade as compared to the current situation where most of the research work is being done in the school using information technologies through the use of networked computer systems (Mai, 2016, p.1). Such a move has been brought about by the increased need of information materials coupled with the increased publications which needed maintenance to avoid losing the information contained in publications. The growing data have been generated every day on education literature materials also necessitated for the use of information technologies or systems to improve the accessibility and access to the information. The factors that have been found to create a significant impact on students information seeking behavior include their educational background and cultural back ground as well as the surrounding environment and student participation. There are students in the institution who were found to embrace the use of the traditional information seeking other than the ones you have been doing. Therefore the students information seeking behavior will only be inclined towards the traditional methods of acquiring information (Soulier et al. 2014, p. 490). Their cultural backgrounds is also a key determinant in this case as the students with a cultural mindset tend to be more towards receptiveness compared to the open minded ideas of information seeking from liberal minds. These factors, therefore, have been found to have a very high positive impact on information needs as well as the information seeking behavior of students. It is, however, important to note that the level of access to information in addition to other aspects depends on the individual information seeking behaviors and skills (Conroy et al. 2014, p.651). The student information needs should, therefore, be specific and relevant to their research and therefore in order to fulfill these needs, the students interact with various online or digital sources. The pursuit of knowledge by the students of this college has therefore been revolutionized especially through the vast explosive of data, data accessibility through internet but the most important feature is to understand whether or not the information meets the student needs. The use of digital resources in this college is frequent however the college still needs an advanced training for using the digital or information technology resources (Holmes, and O'loughlin, 2014, p. 337). However, most technological changes have impacted or had a great impact on the social science students as well as the humanities researchers. The training would offer the students with an opportunity to learn more about how to conduct their research online or to use digital sources as well as how they could make the information available to them online more useful to them. Therefore the development and use of new technology in information seeking by students in colleges are seen as the source of totally new information seeking landscape (Pokhrel Herzog, 2014, p.184). The first major institutional, technological change that affected information seeking in colleges was the introduction of computers in the libraries which were characterized by the limited use of computers. These computers were able to capture the college information library catalog which made it much difficult for the students to access the catalogs of another branch of academics or public library or even any other library for that better. Therefore the computers needed in this case were supposed to provide a wide scope or collection of relevant materials for them to be more effective. The students were therefore limited to access certain sources of their information. The second technological change that had a great impact on Holmes Community College was the development of an online database which was more practicable which was developed through searching against other larger databases (Gropper 2014, p. 337). This was referred to as online searching but required more qualities which not every student had this, therefore, called for further training on the use of the internet or information technology to conduct academic research (Vigdor et al. 2014, p. 1108). Such a database would provide the students with a platform to search the required information through the established database in the information system. The other technological change was in the development of the internet and world web. This is normally considered to be the most significant development in technology that brought a great impact not only to the education world but the entire online research platform. The development of this website provided a platform where users of different information systems can use the internet features available to them such as Google (Spitzer 2014, p. 83). This product made research work easier as information was stored in this product database and was made available all the time for the users. It, therefore, enabled the students of this college as well as staff to gain access to information all over the world from anywhere. It made their learning easy, and students did not have to be much concerned with the issues of maintaining so many material publications. Since the idea of the problem of where to look for the information was solved, the students also suffered a major concern on where to save their research work once they are done. This however led to the development or the idea of creating digital libraries of all manner of both textual as well as the image material and also to create an online portal to access the resources (Poole and Sky-McIlvain 2014, p. 2). Such digital libraries allowed the institution to keep all its relevant information or documents online where they could be easily accessed or retrieved in the event of a need. The students could also save their data under such a digital library and be able to retrieve them when in need. Therefore, technological change has indeed revolutionized the information seeking behavior of students and particularly those of the above case study of Holmes Community College. A great transformation and change have been experienced from the traditional information seeking methods to online or internet and website information seeking methods (Alnahdi 2014, p. 2). The information has become more useful to the students as it was before as it can meet the needs of the user or the researcher. However more developments and more technological development, advancements and innovations have continued to be experienced, the management of the school should adopt a technology that supports the needs of the user. The technological changes have also changed the students mentality towards research which many were of the view that it is a hard or tough discipline just because they were unable to get the required information resource materials. Improved technology has made it easier for them to engage in more research work due to the availability of online research materials (Spivakovska et al. 2014, p.203). It is also important to note that information technology helped to remove disciplinary constraints. Such constraints required that some disciplinary required less extensive information gathering from the published resources. However, the success of the use of technology was found to be affected by lack of awareness of the relevant electronic resources. Conclusion Throughout the history of development, it is important to note that research forms an important part of daily lives of some people. The success of an educational institution in bringing up a generation that is all round is depended on the information they gain from their institution and how its applicable in different areas of their life. Technological change has played an important role in the development and understanding of information seeking behavior of students. It is the need of the information that dictates how a student will interact with certain information. The effectiveness of technological change is achieved in education if the needs of the supporters have been met as well as the purpose intended. Holmes Community College has therefore continued to enjoy years of excellence in the provision of highest quality education which has helped many students to seek self-improvement. List of References Alnahdi, G., 2014. Assistive technology in special education and the universal design for learning. TOJET: The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology, 13(2). Conroy, D.E., Yang, C.H. and Maher, J.P., 2014. Behavior change techniques in top-ranked mobile apps for physical activity. American journal of preventive medicine, 46(6), pp.649-652. Gropper, R.J., Gotlieb, H., Kronitz, R. and Tannock, R., 2014. Working memory training in college students with ADHD or LD. Journal of Attention Disorders, 18(4), pp.331-345. Holmes, K.M. and O'loughlin, N., 2014. The experiences of people with learning disabilities on social networking sites.British Journal of Learning Disabilities, 42(1), pp.1-5. Mai, J.E., 2016. Looking for information: A survey of research on information seeking, needs, and behavior.Emerald Group Publishing. Mills, L.A., Knezek, G. and Khaddage, F., 2014. Information Seeking, Information Sharing, and going mobile: Three bridges to informal learning. Computers in Human Behavior, 32, pp.324-334. Pokhrel, P., Little, M.A. and Herzog, T.A., 2014. Current methods in health behavior research among US community college students: a review of the literature. Evaluation the health professions, 37(2), pp.178-202. Poole, B.J. and Sky-McIlvain, E., 2014.Education for an information age. 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Pakistan Journal of Information Management Libraries (PJIML), 10. Vigdor, J.L., Ladd, H.F. and Martinez, E., 2014. Scaling the digital divide: Home computer technology and student achievement.Economic Inquiry, 52(3), pp.1103-1119. Zhang, Y., 2014. Beyond quality and accessibility: Source selection in consumer health information searching. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 65(5), pp.911-927.
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