Social media as a supplementary tool to teaching and learning: A case of first year students at a University of Technology

The educational sector has experienced transition from physical classes to online classes owing to COVID-19 that had the world by the scruff of its neck. After COVID-19 restrictions were lifted educational sectors had to maintain a clean transition from online classes back to physical classes hence they adopted what is known as blended learning to accommodate both admires or physical and virtual classes. This transition led to most institutions adopting social media as a supplement tool to ensure that the transition was smooth, and this gave rise to the usage of social media in teaching and learning. Consequently, this quantitative study sought to investigate the most preferred social media platforms by the students for the purpose of teaching and learning. Convenience sampling was used to administer closed ended questionnaires to 37 Engineering Graphics and Design (EGD) first-year pre-service teachers. These questionnaires will follow a 5 Likert type scale. The resulting data was analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 29.00. With the aid of Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), the findings show that WhatsApp and YouTube are the most preferred social media platform by students to be used for teaching and learning as they recorded a mean score of 4.54 and 4.30 respectively. The findings also revealed that smartphone is the device that most students access social media on for schooling purposes. Based on the findings, this chapter recommends that universities should adopt social media such as WhatsApp and YouTube as the official tools to be used to supplement learning management systems (LMS) as most students struggle to access such platforms and find more easier to use WhatsApp and YouTube.