Abstract
Networking plays an important role in research projects to build a community and audience around a research area. Using social media is popular in project communication as it provides the ability to engage with a group of followers daily. Such online networking tools provide the advantage of providing near-realtime data, which can be used to evaluate communication and networking success. This does, however, present a problem of what data can be collected in a reasonable timeframe to usefully feed back into the project’s strategies. This paper presents the evaluation approach the Research on Open Educational Resources for Development in the Global South (ROER4D) project has applied to understanding the project’s reach and engagement on the social networking site Twitter. This evaluation considered: 1) To what extent has ROER4D built a network of OER scholars? and 2) Which of ROER4D’s actions have been most effective at growing the network? Using a Utilization Focused Evaluation framework, this evaluation established a workflow through which the project’s Twitter network growth and snapshots of key online interactions could be tracked over time. Systematic measuring systems were set up to collect, select and analyse the most useful data to inform the project from three sources: Twitter analytics, Twitter Archiving Google Spreadsheet, and NodeXL. The social networking analysis shows the extent to which the project is building a network of scholars and what may have contributed to this growth. The feasibility of this networking evaluation approach for use by other projects, especially in the Global South, as well as the considerations when analysing Twitter data and metrics from accounts that would generally appeal to, in this case, the open education and OER communities, are highlighted.
Highlights
A network is a social structure composed of people and/or entities linked by a given type of relationship (Haines et al, 2011)
Evaluating the ROER4D network’s social network This paper presents the evaluation approach the Research on Open Educational Resources for Development in the Global South (ROER4D) project has applied to understanding the project’s reach and engagement on Twitter
The approach that ROER4D has used, involving systematic measuring systems to collect, select and analyse Twitter data, allows for analysis that shows the extent of network building and what has worked to achieve this
Summary
A network is a social structure composed of people and/or entities linked by a given type of relationship (Haines et al, 2011). Gathering useful social networking analysis data for evaluation Visualising, exploring and understanding structural data about relationships between members within networks is known as social network analysis (SNA) (Durland and Fredericks, 2005; Freeman, 2011; Hoppe and Reinelt, 2010) Online networking sites, such as Twitter, are inherently more amenable to SNA given the potential for extracting and analysing large amounts of data in near-real time. Ford, Veletsianos and Resta (2014), for example, analysed the tweets containing #PhDChat sent out over one month, to gain insight into the network of tweeters using this hashtag In approaching such a large pool of available data from a platform such as Twitter, the problem can be determining what to collect, select and analyse. Steps 9 to 12 help to reflect back on whether the evaluation has met the needs of the PIU, which in this case includes whether further uses for the networking data can be brought to bear and where the evaluation design can be improved upon as the project moves forward
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