The challenge of undernutrition (stunting and wasting) still remains a major health concern in children below 5 years of age in Africa, with the continent accounting for more than one third of all stunted children and more than one quarter of all wasted children globally. Despite the growing evidence on the role of agriculture interventions in improving nutrition, empirical evidence on the impact of livestock intervention on nutrition in Africa is scant. This review is aimed at determining whether livestock interventions are effective in reducing undernutrition in children below five years of age and in pregnant and lactating women in Africa. The review will be conducted according to PRISMA guidelines. Major electronic databases will be searched and complemented with grey and non-indexed literature from google and google scholar, and expert consultation for additional articles and reports. PICO criteria will be used while employing search strategies including MeSH, Boolean search operators and truncation/wildcard symbol to narrow or broaden the search. Articles on effect of livestock interventions on maternal and child nutrition conducted in Africa that meet the set inclusion criteria will be included in the review after critical appraisal by two independent reviewers. A standardized form will be used to extract data from included studies. The extracted data will be summarized and synthesized both qualitatively and quantitatively and key outcomes presented. Evidence generated from the systematic review and meta-analysis will be important for guiding nutrition sensitive livestock interventions and policies on nutrition programming, specifically on how to leverage on livestock interventions to reduce the burden of undernutrition.

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With the integration of social media in journalism practice, media training institutions must focus on preparing future media professionals with the right mix of digital skills for the industry. Although efforts to improve students’ online skills readiness are evident in schools, no reliable tool exists to assess students’ confidence in doing online journalism tasks upon graduation. This study develops and validates an Online Journalism Self-Efficacy Scale (OJSES) that can be used to measure mass communication students’ perceptions of their self-efficacy for online journalism work. Items for the proposed scale were developed from a comprehensive literature review and refined by eight online journalism professionals (five online journalism lecturers and three online news editors). To explore the factor structure of the tool, exploratory factor analysis of data from a sample of finalist undergraduate mass communication students (n = 182) in five Rwandan universities was done. Results suggested that the OJSES is a five-dimensional tool that comprises 27 items. This scale measures online journalism self-efficacy in terms of students’ capabilities to conduct online journalism research, communicate with social media tools, create and share multimedia content online, observe ethical online publishing and use social media to solve organizational problems. The scale demonstrated reliability with a Cronbach’s alpha value of 0.785 and the five self-efficacy dimensions explaining 51.1 per cent of the total variance. The scale’s psychometric soundness implied its suitability not only to empirically measure the students’ confidence in working in online environments but also guide capacity-building for the required online skills for the media industry.

With a wide variety of easily-accessible internet tools, social media have revolutionized the way people access, create and share information. Apart from facilitating social networking, these online platforms are also considered critical enablers of professional competence development, with perceptions of their use in promoting learning – in a domain like journalism – gaining currency. Using Rwanda as a case study, this article explores students’ attitudes towards social media use in professional learning and how these predict their self-efficacy for online journalism work. Empirical data was gathered from mass communication students from five Rwandan universities (n=143), who completed a researcher-constructed ‘online journalism self-efficacy’ (OJSE) survey. Descriptive findings indicated that the students are highly efficacious in most online journalism skills. Inferential statistical analysis demonstrate that the students’ beliefs, feelings and actions regarding social media as professional learning tools, significantly correlated with the students’ online journalism self-efficacy. The results disconfirm the null hypothesis that negate the existence of a significant relationship between these variables. In light of the study’s results, educators need to leverage the students’ positive social media attitudes to enhance and innovative student-centred teaching and learning approaches – where learners harness the affordances of the social media tools for their professional growth. Keywords: Online Journalism, Journalism students, Attitudes, Self-efficacy, RwandaHow to cite this article:Njuguna, J., Mberia, H.K. & Jjuuko, M. 2020. Influence of attitudes to social media use in professional learning on students’ online journalism self-efficacy beliefs. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the South. 4(2): 160-179. https://doi.org/10.36615/sotls.v4i2.134.This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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