Measuring a university-community collaboration using social network analysis

One of the roles of a modern university is to engage with the education community as a co-creator of society's collective knowledge. Co-creation, however, is known to be a complex task that relies on collaboration across a network of participants. This paper shows how social network analysis was used to chart, retrospectively, the development of a knowledge co-creation network established through collaboration between educators, scientists and secondary school teachers. The analysis suggests that such measurements may be useful in establishment and sustainability of a well-connected collaborative project network. In the case of this particular project, the analysis suggests ways in which the project could have been optimised through consideration of progression and effectiveness measures. A surprising result was that pre-service teacher in initial teacher education programs may serve as an effective way to sustain project outcomes. Potential application of this type of analysis is discussed as a way of ensuring effective progress in university-community engagement projects.