Information Seeking Behaviour Among Distance Education Learners in Relation to Gender, Location and Education.

The part of self-efficacy in diverse tasks and learning environment has mainly been emphasized, exclusively in searching for information by the distance learners. The study conducted survey with the distance students of Bangalore University forms the subject matter of this research. Questionnaires were distributed personally during the contact classes at the study centers and postgraduate departments of the university and was able to retrieve maximum quantity i.e., 1445 (93.22%) of the filled in questionnaires from the distributed 1550 questionnaires of the sample population. The Major objective of the study is to identify the needs and address the behavioural pattern of distance learners of this university in connection with information searching, locating and using relevant information from institutional libraries and on the internet for their specific learning and educational needs. Formal and informal sources of information including electronic resources which were utilized by distance learners, the preferred format and also the barriers in seeking required information etc., are identified and examined and the factors that influence seeking information, such as gender, course of study and place of residence are analyzed in this study. It is observed from the study that there were more males i.e., 829 (57.40%) of the 1445 respondents and 616 (42.6%) were females. The results of the survey showed that 1166 (80.7%) of the respondents lived in the urban areas and 279 (19.3%) residing in the rural areas. It is found out from the study that majority of these students are occasional library users and visited the libraries more often during the contact classes. Accordingly, access to information was very much limited, public libraries had considerable impact on the achievement of such students as the results showed that 600 (41.50%) students strongly agree that public library is very much important. Internet was also used as one of the chief information sources as 1318 (91.20%) students daily used it for educational and other related activities. Distance learners' age, educational qualification and the location of residence seem to have an influence on their information seeking behaviour given that first year undergraduate students have a tendency to start with the study materials provided by the university, while older students depend more on library than on the study materials provided by the university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]