The Impact of COVID-19 on Academic Research among Lecturers in Higher Institutions in Rivers State, Nigeria

Abstract

The advent of Covid-19 pandemic has altered events and activities in almost all areas of human endeavour including conduct of academic research in higher institutions of learning. To this end, many institutions, organizations and governments are assessing the impact of this disease with a view to recovering from it and adopting survival strategies to cope with it and in the post era. The purpose of this paper therefore is to find out the impact of Covid-19 on academic research among lecturers in higher institutions in Rivers State. The study adopted the descriptive research design. Two research questions and one hypothesis were formulated to guide the study. The population comprised all university lecturers in the three universities in Rivers State. The Stratified random sampling technique was used to select the sample size of 360. The instrument for data collection was a questionnaire titled: ‘Impact of Covid-19 on Research Questionnaire (ICRQ)'. The research questions were answered with mean and standard deviation, while the hypothesis was tested with t-test at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study showed that restriction on conference, workshop and seminar attendance, suspension of research activities and funding, adoption of virtual learning environment for conferences and paper presentations, slow network and speed of internet, high cost of data for internet connections, difficulty switching to the e-learning platforms, etc. Impact of Covid-19 on academic research was the same for all the lecturers – male and female in the higher institutions in Rivers State. The study recommended that adoption of virtual and e-learning platforms have come to stay. Lecturers should update their knowledge in line with the recent trend in order to be relevant in the university system.