The 2019 Online Conversation Benchmarks for Higher Education: A Campus Sonar Social Listening Study opens with “[t]he internet is real life,” and continues with a discussion of how institutions of higher education can use the internet to connect with their communities. It goes on to say, “...the reality is that their online presence is a combination of what they say about themselves and what others say about them.” As soon as I read that, I realized the importance of this study. The combination of what institutions say about themselves and what their community says, if we remove the online part, is also known as educational or campus ethos, which is the story, narrative, or mission institutions build around themselves but don't directly control.
Steven Graham (1998) dives deeper into defining educational ethos and provides a more clinical explanation. He takes George Kuh’s (1992) description of educational ethos and describes it as five characteristics:
A single, quality interaction plays into what we know about educational or campus ethos. Kezar (2000) wrote: “Campus ethos usually centers on core themes that relate to the human experience, such as family, community, caring, student-centeredness, civic leadership, and responsibility. These themes serve as an anchor for students to connect with as they enter a new community” (p. 13–14). This thought connected with what I read in the benchmark report. How many tweets do we see, retweeted by institutions, of students getting accepted, headed to orientation, or packing up for their first day? These events can serve as anchors and institutions can take the opportunities to meaningfully interact with students who are experiencing these changes to show that they have a caring, student-centered culture. The campus ethos theory also connects with parents of prospective students. If institutions think of parents as partners, they can share their ethos by embracing parent concerns and showing how they work with new or incoming students to meet their needs—something parents of college students want to know.
A particular student quote from Kezar stuck with me, demonstrating the theory that institutional connection or educational ethos matters.
"The connections I feel to faculty and staff on the campus have made me succeed as a student. When I came to campus, I was a below-average student and no one in my family thought I would succeed. But I felt something here that I have never felt anywhere else, and it is a sense of caring that makes me want to learn. And it is not just one person saying that but the entire campus environment [that] makes me feel this way." |
Thinking about that pull—that sense of caring and community—combined with the research in the benchmark report, allows us to show our ethos with every online interaction. Every time a prospective student or family mentions us, institutions can take the time to show they care and literally change the world of that student.
A study by Graham and Long Gisi (2000), which included looking at the effect of educational ethos, found that the educational ethos of the institution, including how much they cared for students, mattered more than just the amount of time a student spent participating in campus activities. The educational ethos that the campus community builds, that faculty and administration further embeds, and that the students describe when talking about their success, can start or be contributed to with every single, engaging moment on social media. Just one meaningful interaction can impact a student’s success, how an alumnus talks about the institution, and how a prospective student connects.