Impacts of Globalisation and Awareness of Higher Education Policy in Adoption and Use of ICT in Libyan Universities

This research study focuses on impacts of globalisation and the awareness of Higher Education policy Reform HEPR on the Information and Communications Technology for public universities using the University of Tripoli (UoT). The aim of this study therefore is to explore the impact of globalisation and the awareness of implementation of HEPR on the use of ICT in Libyan public Universities (LPUs). This is an important subject since the Libyan state has begun to ensure that ICT is adopted and used in University education. It has undertaken this course of action in order to improve the role of public universities and to further the movement towards sustainable development. This study was designed to contribute to the research development and improvement of ICT adoption in Libyan Higher Education. The main contribution of this study is to provide information on how to make full use of ICT in LPUs and to determine to what extent these universities adopt and us.

Given the nature of this research a qualitative content analysis was adopted to collect and analyse the data and present the findings which gathered via sixteen semi-structured interviews, that were conducted with forty-four graduate students, ten academic staff from UoT and six Higher Education Officials from Ministry of Higher education and Scientific Research (MoHESR) .

The findings of this study indicated that the globalisation and the awareness of implementation of HEPR are the most important factors for the adoption and use of ICT by the participants, and globalisation together with HEPR seems gradually to be changing impact and driving adoption, and use of new ICT among LPUs. It is changing the very fundamentals of learning and teaching. The findings also show that the rapid pace of globalisation and the increase level of the awareness of implementation HEPR, which has a significant potential to motivate participants, may lead to increased adoption and the effective use of ICT in LPUs.

Based on the findings, this study offers the following recommendations that can be used to improve and support the adoption and use of ICT tools in the LPUs. These included supporting graduate students, and academic staff in developing their knowledge and skills in using ICT tools, providing a continuous professional development for them in ICT, the need to create a policy in higher education to guide the use of ICT tools in higher education and supporting universities to build their ICT resources and infrastructure. These will help graduate students and academic staff to effectively integrate ICT tools into teaching learning and administrative it also recommended that future research should be conducted with larger samples across different levels of education or with other organisations and other time periods.