Distance Education as a Tool for Human Resources Development for the Implementation of the Universal Basic Education Programme in Ebonyi State Junior Secondary Schools

Abstract

The study examined distance education as a tool for human resource development for junior secondary schools in Ebonyi State, Nigeria and it adopted a descriptive survey as the design. The population of the study consists of 2,410 secondary school teachers. Stratified simple random sampling technique was used to select 690 respondents. The instrument for data collection is a researcher self-structured questionnaire .Three experts; two from Educational Administration and one from Test and Measurement all from Ebonyi State University, Abakaliki were used to determine its face validity. The reliability of the instrument was established using the test re-test method where 228 teachers were used. The same instrument was administered on the same respondents after two weeks interval and was correlated using Cormbach Alpha internal consistency co-efficient and it yielded 0.85 co-efficient.690 copies of the questionnaire were administered to the respondents, but only 680 copies were returned and used for the study. Data Collected from the 680 respondents were analysed using mean (x) and standard deviations to answer the three research questions. One of the findings was that Distance Education has improved quality of teachers in classroom delivery of instruction to a very high extent in Ebonyi State junior Secondary schools.