Asia Pacific Journal of Multidisciplinary Research P-ISSN 2350-7756 | E-ISSN 2350-8442 | Volume 2, No. 6 | December 2014 __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 144 P-ISSN 2350-7756 | E-ISSN 2350-8442 | www.apjmr.com Preparedness and Attitude of College Students toward ICT-Based Education In a Younger HEI in Bacoor City, Cavite, Philippines Jonathan R. Adanza, PhD Research Development Officer, St. Dominic College of Asia, Bacoor City, Philippines jadanza@sdca.edu.ph Date Received: November 5, 2014; Date Revised: November 30, 2014 Abstract - The ubiquity of ICT has been a phenomenon in any of the world’s educational system. With the challenges of ASEAN integration in 2015, are new and younger HEI’s and their learners coping with this trend? This study seeks to determine the preparedness and attitude of higher education students of new HEI’s about ICT-based education. Descriptive design was used in this research that utilized a researcher-made questionnaire (α=.971). The results of the study show that college students have positive affirmation (“agree”) about ICT use in education (x=3.71, S=.75). Moreover, it is also revealed that gender significantly influence attitude of students (z=3.91, p=.00), in which male has higher level of attitude (x=3.91) than women (x=3.61). Moreover, it demonstrates that generally preparedness towards ICT has nothing to do with the attitude of students toward ICT use in education. However, a significant negligible positive correlation is noted between exposure to ICT and attitude at .05 level of significance (r=.15; p=.002; one-tailed), which implies that the more a student is exposed to ICT, the more that one’s attitude towards ICT-based education improves. It was concluded that ICT-based education through full ICT integration can be easily accepted and adapted as the new structure of education for the next years to come. Therefore, new and younger HEIs should invest more on ICT accessibility and connectivity to further enhance attitude and preparedness towards ICT-based education. Keywords - ICT-Based Education, ICT Attitude, ICT Preparedness I. INTRODUCTION The use of information and communications technology has been a universal phenomenon. From the invention of the wheel, to the discovery of the telephone, and to the uncovering of one of the greatest discoveries of all—the Internet; technology has encroached into the workplace. Just as the declaration of the computer as Time Magazine’s 1982 Person of the Year foreshadowed the computer’s ubiquity in everyday life, we believe this symbolic award is a harbinger of vast technological and societal changes that will unfold over many years. Information technologies have become more increasingly ubiquitous and more social. [1] In South Asia, particularly Bhutan, which is a third-world country, exponential growth of this industry has been observed since the introduction of computers in the 1980s. Pradhan (2003a) revealed that Bhutan has 1,130 internet connections yet in just two years in 2005 it increased to 3,036 (Government of Bhutan, 2006, as cited in Baggaley and Belawati (2010a)[2]. To corroborate this, an article shared that as of 2010, 40 percent of adults age 30 and over, 72 % of young adults, and 73% of teens use social network sites, with year-over-year time spent on Facebook increasing by 566%. In 2009, Twitter users were generating 35 million messages (tweets) per day. Wikipedia has more than 12 million registered users and more than 3 million content pages. Many examples of vibrant communities have emerged on the web, as well as novel forms of social- computational systems such as prediction markets, collaborative filtering, social bookmarking, online auctions, and network-based peer-production systems [3]. Indeed, these further show that ICT, particularly the Internet, is truly a global infrastructure for the 21 st century- the first really new infrastructure to develop in nearly a century. A. ICT and Education Kozma (2010) asserted that every aspect of 21 st century society is being transformed by information and communication technologies: the economy, the workplace, the home, commerce, government, the health sector and even education.[4] However, Kozma believed that ICT in education is late compared to others because according to him, educational systems (referring to changes made by ICTs to other aspects) operate much as they did at the beginning of the 20 th century (cf. Roblyer and Doering, 2013a).[5]