An Empirical Assessment of the Internet Usage Pattern and Academic Development of Students In the Murshidabad District of West Bengal

Abstract

It is known that the internet can be a vehicle for education and development with universal accessibility. The acceptance of online education has successfully disrupted the conventional framework of classroom teaching and delivers knowledge anywhere and everywhere to those who seek it at the click of a button. However, when discussing mass education, the classroom teaching and learning format will remain the tried and tested model of training and holistically developing young minds. Again, considering the potential of online education and training it brings us to the pursuit of optimizing the process of gaining knowledge by hybridizing it. We are encouraging students to access knowledge online along with classroom teaching. So, how effective is this hybridized process of learning? Our paper attempts to find a quantifiable correlation between the extent of this online learning process's contribution to the overall academic development of graduate and postgraduate students from the Murshidabad district of West Bengal, India. It also attempts to indicate aberrant internet usage patterns in the students that may directly or indirectly affect their goal of studentship.