Differential impact of web technology on various dimensions of students' academic and non-academic activities (a case study)

Abstract

Internet and computing have been advocated as one shot solution to many existing constraints and difficulties of education system. Our work aims to study exhaustively differential impact of Web technology on various dimensions of students' academic performance, co-curricular, extra-curricular and non-academic activities. We analyzed the Internet usage behavior of students in terms of average time spent in Internet per day and category of visited Websites by them along with the effects of these Internet usage behaviors on their academic performance (CPI) and other co-curricular and extra-curricular activities. For this analysis we used proxy server access log files of an engineering college in India which are collected during 30 months continually. We have classified student activities (with extending ODP classification scheme) under four categories: Curricular, Co-Curricular, Extra-Curricular and Non-Curricular. Only 59% of female students used Internet continually as against 81% of male students. This analysis led us to conclude that a significant gender gap exists in terms of Internet usage.