Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Date of this Version
8-2022
Abstract
The attraction of social media tools in higher education has been attributed to the affordances and participatory nature that the tools offer. For undergraduates in this generation, social networking has become an “addiction”. Ordinarily, a student who has a Facebook account opens the account daily to check new updates and spends hours studying new updates until he/she realizes that there are more important things to do like school work that has been missed because of logging in to a social platform. The research design adopted for the study is a descriptive survey. A multistage random sampling technique was used for the study. Based on a sampling fraction of 36% and with the use of the balloting method, six faculties were randomly selected at the first stage. At the last stage, a sampling fraction of 10% was used to get the sample size of 213. Results on the ethical behavior revealed that they reference the websites used for academic work which ranked highest with a mean score of 2.98. This was followed by “sharing of broadcast and messages when I don’t know the source” which had the second-highest score in terms of mean with a score of 2.91. Undergraduates use social media with WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram among the most used social media networks. The challenges facing the undergraduates' use of social media are majorly erratic power supply and poor internet connectivity. Lecturers can adopt new strategies by channeling assignments on social media platforms to inculcate the habit of using these sites for academic work.