Skill Improvement Needs of Extension Agents for Effective Extension Education Service Delivery in Covid-19 Pandemic Era (Published)
The main purpose of this study was to determine the skill improvement needs of extension agent for effective extension education service delivery in covid-19 pandemic era. This study was carried out in Cross River State. The population of the study was 130 extension agents in the three agricultural zones of the State. There was no sampling: therefore the entire population was involved in the study due to manageable size of the population. The instrument used to collect data was a structured questionnaire developed by the researcher. The instrument was validated by 3 experts, 2 from Federal Ministry of Agriculture Calabar and 1 from Measurement and Evaluation Department of University of Calabar. The data collected were analyzed using Need Gap Analysis. It was found out that Extension Agents need improvement in the pedagogies method, group formation of farmer’s method and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) method. It was recommended that conferences and workshops should be organised by ministry of Agriculture for extension pedagogies, group formation and ICT specialists in collaboration with the State Government for effective extension education service delivery.
Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic, Improvement, Skill, extension agents, extension education
Competency Improvement Needs of Facilitators for Enhancing Adult Education Programme in Edo State, Nigeria (Published)
We designed this study to determine the skill improvement needs of facilitators for enhancing Adult learning programmes in Edo state, Nigeria. The research design was a descriptive survey. The population of the study was 549. Simple random sampling technique was used to drown a sample of 108 facilitators by balloting. Two research queries were posed with two null hypotheses to guide the study. A researcher-designed questionnaire was used to elicit information from the respondents. The questionnaire instrument was subjected to face and content validation using three experts from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. We used Cronbach alpha to determine the reliability coefficient of the instrument. The result was .85 and .68 for each query. We analyzed the data collected using mean and standard deviation to answer the research queries and used t-test statistics to analyze the hypotheses at (P>0.05) level of significance. The result showed that the skill improvement needs of facilitators to enhance adult education programme include: the ability to find the right condition that will enable achievement of programme goals, analytical ability to evaluate the various ways in the light of multiple factors that may hinder or help in programme implementation, and the ability to sequentially coordinate activities for a smooth flow of programme activities. It also includes listening ability, knowing the demographic nature of messages, and presentation of subject matter in the right context for learners understanding among others. We recommended that facilitators should be equipped with these skills to improve adult education programmes in Edo state Nigeria.
Keywords: Adult Education, Improvement, Needs, competency, facilitators