Institutionalizing Social Network Solutions in Tertiary Educational Institutions

Abstract

As in other socioeconomic spheres, social networks and media are veritable tools for education as they provide easy channels for information and knowledge exchange and their trendy nature make them very attractive and portable among the young and old. However, these applications are fraught with security challenges ranging from surveillance to invasion of privacy and unwarranted tampering with user data regardless of the seemingly impressive underlying rights of users as claimed by the vendors as to user accounts. Various vulnerabilities are reported daily as well as data leaks. There appears to be no end to these unwarranted infringement on rights of users. Sadly, majority of the popular social networking platforms irrespective of their modus operandi are guilty of this silent crime. Users of such applications are often carried away with flashy features without paying reasonable attention to the security and privacy of their data. In many cases users appear to have relinquished their privacy rights to these platforms owing to the fact that many users who suffer data breaches are either ignorant of such or may not have the wherewithal to challenge the vendors through legal actions. Interestingly a large chunk of users are unaware of their fundamental rights on such platforms. This paper underscores the relevance of social networks and social media in tertiary education vis-à-vis the popularly used social networks and advocates for the evolution and institutionalizing of specific tertiary education social network (TESN) that captures the unique demands of students and lecturers. The rapid application development paradigm is used to demonstrate a prototype of a TESN that ensures privacy and security of user data. It is concluded that this application presents a comparative performance while offering institutional data protection, privacy and security of user data.