www.tjprc.org editor@tjprc.org ATTITUDE OF THE FACULTY MEMBERS TOWARDS INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY (ICT) IN STATE AGRICULTURAL UNIVERSITIES P. V. SATHYA GOPAL, K. SHIREESHA & N. P. ESWARA REDDY ICAR Extramural Research Project, Department of Agricultural Extension S.V.Agricultural College, Acharya N.G. Ranga Agricultural University, Tirupati, India ABSTRACT The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is a very broad term ,focusing on improving the quality, quantity and speed of information reach the students in an educational system. ICT is becoming the basic building blocks of modern society. Many countries now regard understanding ICT and mastering the basic skills and concepts of ICT as part of the core of education, alongside reading, writing and numeracy. With ICT, teachers are able to create their own material and thus have more control over the material used in the classroom than they have had in the past. ICT in agricultural education also has paramount importance to bring reality to the teaching learning process. Ample numbers of ICT tools were also being designed and regularly refined to suit to the teaching learning process in agricultural education. Several research studies were taken up in the host institution on ICT training needs of the faculty members, and the extent of utilization of available ICT tools. But the attitude of faculty members towards ICT was not stressed much in the past research studies which are the most vital component influence the application of ICT. Hence the present study was taken up under the ICAR extramural research project during the year 2016-17 with the objective of analyzing the attitude of the faculty members towards ICT and also the factors influencing the attitude of the faculty members towards ICT utilization in Agricultural education. The study revealed that more than one third of the faculty members had a neutral attitude towards ICT utilization followed by moderately favorable attitude. Just about one fourth of them had shown moderate to highly unfavorable attitude. On the other side, the highlyfavorablee attitude towards ICT utilization was noticed by nearly 13.13 per cent of the faculty members. The study revealed that Global knowledge sharing, Speedy delivery of information, Effective presentation, updating knowledge and exploring unimaginable information were found to be more significant concepts ranked first, second, third, fourth and fifth with Z values 0.864, 0.832, 0.764, 0.713 and 0.706 respectively and these five concepts contributed more for having a positive attitude towards ICT utilization by the faculty members in State Agricultural Universities. It was observed that the process factors like awareness, possession of knowledge, application proficiency and extent of ICT utilization has shown a positive significant relationship with the attitude of the faculty members in State Agricultural Universities. KEYWORDS: ICT, Attitude, Faculty Members, Utilization & State Agricultural Universities Received: Nov 20, 2017; Accepted: Dec 11, 2017; Published: Mar 01, 2018; Paper Id.: IJESRAPR20183 INTRODUCTION The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is a very broad term, focusing on improving the quality, quantity and speed of information reach the students in an educational system. ICT has become, within a very short time, one of the basic building blocks of modern society. Many countries now regard understanding Original Article International Journal of Educational Science and Research (IJESR) ISSN (P): 2249-6947; ISSN (E): 2249-8052 Vol. 8, Issue 2, Apr 2018, 13-18 © TJPRC Pvt Ltd.