By: Annakleta Haikera
MTC’s corporate communications officer John Ekongo, says the University of Namibia (Unam) had said if students use other social media applications, it should be at their own cost.
This comes after the representative student councils (SRC) at five Unam campuses are dissatisfied with the restrictions of the provided sim cards for data to the students at the university.
According to Ekongo, MTC and Unam joined a partnership to allow students’ data cards to access Unam’s learning platforms.
“The University of Namibia owns platforms such as e-learning and modules and portals only for the university. WhatsApp is not a Namibian-owned learning platform. The university said that if learners want to use other Apps, it should be at their own cost,” he said.
He added that Unam spokesperson John Haufiku clarified to everyone that this should be understandable to the students.
“Students should not access these cards on other compliment internet platforms but their University of Namibia learning platforms,” he added.
On Friday, students reiterated their complaints that some websites, such as YouTube and other educational websites, were blocked.
They also complain about the allocation of 55 Gigabytes to only have 15GB allocated for general usage and 40GB for e-learning.
At the same event, Rundu campus SRC vice president Mukoya Vernet says they feel left out as they were not consulted, despite being the voice of all students at the university.
The SRC expressed concern about some websites being blocked.
“We demand that the restrictions be relaxed on social media platforms mostly used by the staff and students for communications, such as Whatsapp, Facebook and Telegrams, including Twitter. Most of the institutional communications are done via these platforms,” he said.
Another SRC member, Otilie Kavau, said five campuses demand the management of Unam and MTC step down on these restrictions and give them all the apps they want to visit for information-seeking purposes.
“Therefore, given the seriousness of this matter and the impact, it poses on the academic welfare of the students. The SRC, as a result of this, demands the three parties to kindly revisit all the campuses and attend to them as matters emerge,” said Kavau.
The group demands that Unam fails to urgently furnish them with a formal response on or before Wednesday, 22 June.
They say failure to do so will resort the students to what may put the institution’s good name in disrepute.
Last month, Unam part-time students called on management to reverse connectivity restrictions following a change in service providers.
At that time, the students said they were disappointed with the new MTC data connection cards, while some had headaches over the new cards. They also had said the restrictions were made without their consent.
The restrictions only allow the learners to use the data connection on Moodle, Google search engines and Twitter, while they say most of their communication is done on WhatsApp, where they create E-learning groups with their lecturers and other students.
Hans Mukoya, a part-time second-year student, said the new cards are very stressful.
He had said part-time students depend on the internet most of the time, but if the cards are restricted, they are unsure how they will manage to do their assignments on time.
Mukoya claimed the university did not tell them about the restrictions, but it was announced that they would have their own gigs, and the rest would be strictly for e-Learning.
In April, the National Student Association’s (NASA) secretary Shivera Muhepa requested to improve the MTC student data connection.
In a letter sent to Unam’s finance administrator and resource mobilisation Ellen Namhila, Muhepa raised issues of not providing students with the right communication.
He also called for the office to engage MTC to improve its service and add all the students’ apps needed.
