Toward Making Social Media Effective in our Classrooms: A 9-Point Method

Abstract

There is absolutely no doubt that the social media have advanced into Tertiary Institution, but Instructors mostly use social media for personal reasons. This research explores the social media world and how teachers use social media in their classes, by conducting a mixed method research where open-ended questionnaires were given to lecturers and interviews were further conducted with some selected lecturers in order to assess how they use social media in their classes. The information collected was organized and used to teach part of a class in multimedia development course where they serve as the control group. A close-ended questionnaire was then administered to the control group at the end of the course and their level of satisfaction recorded. The remaining part of the class forms the experimental group and was taught using the researcher’s 9-point method of applying social media in the classroom; using the same questionnaire, their satisfaction level was recorded. The data collected on the student’s satisfaction level was analyzed using SPSS software version 20 and the result was that most of the teachers employ the social media for personal use, and that older teachers use less social media in education than their younger counterparts. High social media usage was found among both the teachers and students so also was the time spent on social media and a significant increase in satisfaction level was noticed among students of the experimental group.