New Technology in Tertiary Education in India: Adoption and Impediments

The paper is based on a study that uses primary data collected from students of two private and two public universities located in the NCR. The survey was conducted during July-August, 2015. The Information on provision and use of New Education Technologies (NET), demographic information, factors affecting the use of new technologies, its impact, job preferences, and purpose of NET use were collected from 54 students of these universities. Findings of the study suggest that senior students (researchers) used NET more extensively. It also finds evidence of strong association between degree of NET use and job preference. The students whose preference is ICT related jobs used more advanced NET than those who were more inclined towards non-ICT related jobs such as legal, medical, accountancy etc. The NET use is found to be more prevalent in self-financed universities than the government aided ones. Two major impediments namely; insufficiency of e-class infrastructure and unreliability of new technologies emerged significant in differentiating students based on their level of NET use. The findings also support the argument that NET use impacts the students in several ways such as making them more confident and provides opportunity to interact with students of other institutions.