Investigating the Use of Social Media as a Learning and Teaching Tool in Higher Education Institutions of Namibia

The present generation of students entering the higher education institutions are digital natives, raised in a techno-centric world where present technologies play an essential role in human life and where innovations are absorbed and adopted quickly. Technology has emerged with various tools such as social media tools which have become pervasive to the extent that students and instructors in higher education use them all the time either for academic purposes or for personal use. Among these social media tools, the most popular ones are Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, YouTube, LinkedIn and WhatsApp messenger. The purpose of this study will be to investigate the use of social media as a learning and teaching tool in the higher education context of a developing African country of Namibia. The top three institutions namely the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST), the University of Namibia (UNAM) and the International University of Management (IUM) will be used for this study. Secondly the study will analyse the usage trend of social media by students and lecturers in Namibia and further to that the study will investigate the social media tools suitable for conveying educational materials, and finally the research will recommend possible ways social media can be used in the Namibian higher education institutions to enhance positive learning experiences. The target population that will be selected for this study are lecturers and undergraduate students of the three higher education institutions in Namibia. The sample of the study will be 60 students and 10 lecturers from each institution. The selection will be done using the simple random sampling technique. A mixed method approach which will comprise of a well-designed questionnaires and semi- structured interviews will be used as instruments for data collection in order to achieve the aims and objectives of this research. Lastly the data will be analyzed using a Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). .