Abstract

Author(s): Mahesh G T, Adithyakumari H

Distance education is a means of education which has become more and more popular as a result of the swift development in the education system. The growth and development in distance education where education is supported, delivered and sustained at the doorsteps of the learner has created new way of serving the learning community creating difficulty in library services. Distance learners and conventional learners are now having right to use to a world of electronic information in the information super highway. Innovative information and communication technologies, and conventional pedagogic methods, need library and information professionals to reconsider the system they collect, develop, handle and convey or disseminate the information resources and their services. Information need is a generally widespread indispensable feature of human beings in day to day activity across the world. A qualititative approach has been used to elucidate the information seeking behaviour of distance education learners, to identify the information needs, and sources used by the distance education learners of Directorate of Correspondence Courses (DCC) & Distance Education (DE), Bangalore University (BU). The survey method was adopted for the research study with a structured questionnaire and stratified random sampling was used as a technique to select the respondents from the total study population of undergraduate and post graduate courses. Descriptive statistical measures such as percentages and frequency distribution were employed for data analysis. The findings of the study shows that 70% of the respondents need information on previous years question papers, 61% needs information on library resources and 55% of the respondents need information to support their current learning. Also, 57.6% of the sample respondents were using the internet as the source of information followed by 50.3% of the distance learners opined that books were frequently used as source of information and 57.6% of the respondents used internet has another major source of information.