As I read communications measurement guru Katie Paine’s book, Measure What Matters, I’m wondering how it applies to education.
The book focuses almost exclusively on business which leaves me wondering about education equivalents of things like customers, sales and “ROI” (Return on investment).
Also, measuring social media success in education poses the same challenge as measuring it anywhere else: success depends on so many things, it’s almost impossible to know what, if any, part social media played. For example, if you start using social media in your school and test scores go up a year later, how do you know what role social media played? As much as it would make things easier, you can’t create a control group of social media have-not kids, so what do you do?
(Then again, this is the same problem you have measuring any strategy you try, but you still try them. So why have a double standard for social media? Fear of the unknown is often the real reason behind not doing things.)
Another challenge with measuring the impact of social media in schools is the fact that getting results with social media takes time – but teachers only have kids for one year. Then there’s the need to do baseline measurements before starting social media initiatives so you can see if they change anything. Studies take time, cutting in to the already short school year.
Even if you convince decision makers to try social media by showing them how the tools can help achieve the school objectives, you then have to say, “Oh, and by the way, some of the objectives these tools will help you achieve, you don’t know you have yet,” (i.e. helping kids become adept problem-solvers through online collaboration).
So where do you start?
I would argue you start by identifying clear, measurable objectives in key areas like student achievement, teacher learning and school reputation. These should be “bottom line” objectives, like increased sales are for business. These could be the following:
Student achievement – increased test and assessment scores
Teacher learning – # of new learning strategies tried in the classroom, # of courses taken, increased student test and assessment scores
School reputation – increase in positive mentions in traditional and social media
The next step is to encourage all staff to be on the look out for social media tools that can help achieve the objectives. It’s important that all staff be encouraged to help create a culture of innovation and that it not be seen as the specialty of a few.
Finally, try things, measure results, adjust and try again.
Have the you got some first hand experience measuring results? As Obama would say, “Please take 5 minutes to share, right now?”
Also, apologies for the iTunes ad at the beginning that my audio host, Libsyn, adds automatically.
