Online Social Network Influence on Policy Effectiveness and Educational Equity

Any policy, if ill-managed, can waste financial and human resources, cause unnecessary distress, and harm organisations and societies (Choi, 2018; Choi & Walker, 2018). For instance, Choi (2015) discovered the “Teaching English in English” policy in Korea failed as it did not prepare all involved stakeholders for the upcoming changes, which led to waste of resources and an extreme distress leading to early retirement of considerable number of veteran teachers. Meanwhile, online social network (OSN) narrowed the position gaps between the government and other actors, increasing effectiveness (Bertot et al., 2012), as was the case for the Double Reduction Policy and the Fine-tuned Medium of Instruction Policy. Thus, we propose and test a policy effectiveness model using two case policies: school marketing and educational outsourcing, where they provide representative examples of how policies are put into practice. We would also conduct international parallel studies (e.g., South Korea, Nepal, England and China), where the team members have in-depth context knowledge, for instance, in Nepal, on marketing. The context where parallel studies will be conducted and the focus of the study will be decided reflecting the findings from the ongoing pilots. Selecting socio-politico-culturally disparate contexts is necessary to understand the influence of the contextual features, but these were also where the team members have in-depth knowledge, a prerequisite for a policy enactment study. Building on our pilot studies, we investigate how online social networks (OSN) and policy management effectiveness interact via: case studies and integrated computational linguistics and statistical analyses of documents, surveys and OSN messages.

The sub-case studies will determine significant links and suggest strategies to improve school policies in: (a) student recruitment strategies to improve school finance, and (b) quality of outsourced education. Synthesizing these insights will (a) inform ways to increase educational equity and social cohesion, and (b) extend policy enactment theory by building a policy process model that integrates OSN activities. While recent studies examined the interaction between OSN and macro-level policy (e.g., Xue & Diao, 2021), it is yet to be examined what factors shaped the process, and how, and which factors are context-bound and which are context-free have yet to be documented. Moreover, no published study investigated these relations at the school- or individual-levels; thus, this study is original and has great potential for significance and impact.