Postgraduate student's interaction with internet based information resources in their academic activities: a survey

The literature review of the previous studies depict that there are limited number of study to identify the importance of internet-based information resources for fulfill the academic tasks of the postgraduate students. He (2012) conducted a comparative study on use of online information resources by the undergraduate students, and identified that the student used the different information resources for accomplish their various academic task. The search engines are most commonly used sources for performing the complex academic task, and interestingly the social networking sites like Facebook do not play Research Papers Abstract : The paper aims to study the perception of postgraduate students on importance of internet-based information resources for accomplishing their academic tasks. In this study, questionnaire method was used for data collection. A total 130 questionnaires were distributed to the postgraduate students of twenty departments at University of Mysore and 123 filled-in questionnaires were received back with overall response rate of 97.69 %. The study findings reveal that the postgraduate students depend on numerous internet-based resources for fulfill their various academic tasks. For example 'Online dictionary' used for looking definition of concept, 'Google books' for looking required books, 'Google scholar' for looking articles, 'Virtual reference services' for looking answer to some specific questions. Search engines are the most commonly used source for accomplishing the complex academic activities such as preparing 'Class Assignments / Seminars' and 'Academic Examination'. However, the new internet-based information resources 'Social Network Sites like Facebook' are very less important sources for performing both the simple and complex academic task of the postgraduate students. Even though, the use of internet-based information resources have been increased considerably, the traditional resources still play significant role than some other popular internet-based resources for performing the some specific tasks. The majority of respondents optioned that the relevance is major criteria for seeking the information on the web.