Social media is a great tool in science communication, so learning how to use it well is helpful not only for people who self-identify as science communicators, but also for scientists and scientists-to-be.

Teaching social media science communication skills

I’ve explained why I think that that is generally a good idea in our recent virtual poster, but here is an even more recent example of how well it can work: In early April, Prof. Tessa M Hill encouraged her class at UC Davis to do kitchen oceanography experiments and post pictures or videos on the internet. Her student Robert Dellinger posted a video of an overturning circulation on Twitter that got me super excited (and he kindly agreed to write this guest post on it) and as of now, April 16th, it has 70 retweets and 309 likes. That’s  an incredible reach! And if you think it’s just a lucky strike, another student from that class, Linnea Byrd, posted pictures on Instagram which got 276 likes. This might be to a beautiful cover pic and an account with a high following in the first place, but that’s still a lot of people exposed to kitchen oceanography. Both are definitely examples of very successful scicomm!

Talking with Prof. Kerstin Kremer in preparation for a recent science communication course I taught at her university, I decided that I wanted to set up an “evaluation rubric” that can be used for two purposes: As tool in teaching; and to evaluate social media posts.

Making expectations transparent to students

When teaching about the use of social media in science communication, there is a fine balance between, on the one side, a lot of information on what works and what doesn’t (aka “the rules”), and on the other hand the fact that the things that work best are when those exact rules are purpusefully and skillfully broken. But in order to do that, I believe that one needs to first know “the rules”, and the rubric below gives a structured overview that can be used as guidlines when creating an Instagram post.

Grading the students’ Instagram posts

For some classes, Instagram posts are created as artefacts that contribute to the course grade. In those cases, it is very important to be very clear about what the learning outcomes are and how they will be evaluated; especially if the posts are evaluated by someone who did not teach the class themselves. For this, the rubric below might be helpful.

Evaluation rubric for the scicomm aspect of Instagram posts

Please note:

• This rubric is an example only and needs to be adapted and/or expanded to match your classes learning outcomes. Here, the focus is exclusively on the use of Instagram as a communication tool. For examples of how to expand this rubric for use in different contexts, see below
• If points are awarded for each category listed below, they should obviously not be weighted equally when calculating a grade, but priorized according to the class’s learning outcomes
• I’ve only formulated the end points; obviously this could be expanded to explicitly name intermediate qualitiy levels if that makes grading easier for you; I just wanted to put up a general framework.

The basic rubric is structured into four categories: The captions/comments of a post, the use of hashtags and tags, and the use of images.

Evaluation rubric for other aspects of Instagram posts

Of course, you might also want students to break some of “the rules” I gave above if your focus is on other aspects. For example, of you are very interested in how well students are working with literature, even though that is not something that is traditionally done well on Instagram, it is a very valid learning outcome that you might not want to give up, even if it breaks the traditional Instagram style. Then you could include criteria like these ones:

Or if you are using Instagram posts in place of more traditional lab reports, of course additional learning outcomes are to be evaluated. Categories might then include, for example, the ones below. But use any criteria that you would use to evaluate a lab report!

Now let me know what you think. Was this blogpost useful for you? What other aspect of using social media in science teaching would you be interested in?