In the extremely crowded and emerging education market of India, performers of various hues are differentiating themselves in myriad ways of which ranking remains a dominant facet.

Most of the prevalent ranking frameworks focus on a linear standalone position in a hierarchy or scale, which at times doesn’t reflect the eclectic diversity across educational ecosystems in varied geographies.

Mapping and Communicating the wide variegated range of institutional parameters and foci again is a daunting task whereby a one-size-fit-all approach just doesn’t fit the bill.

Having been into the segment for quite a while observing the developments of India’s Education System, we at digitalLEARNING thought of expanding this quest for ranking India’s Best Schools across the country.

A new differentiated approach based on the parameters of:

• Stakeholder perception indexing using social communication tools;
• Online and social analytics driven parameters; and
• Segmenting the business of ranking to the granularity of cities, christened as eduDESTINATIONS has been attempted.

A select list of schools were thereby shortlisted from these 73 eduDESTINATIONS based on secondary editorial research and ranking nominations. This created a cogent sample to base social perception ranking on.

Perception-based Social Indexing

The entire attempt of finding out the Best Schools of India for the year 2015 was therefore based on a set of five perception based parameters namely:

• Goodwill, Legacy & Reputation
• Academic Ecosystem & Outcomes
• Future-ready Academic Infrastructure
• Enrichment of Learning Experience
• Career Advancement

An elaborate social survey was thereby configured on the basis of aforesaid parameters. The shortlisted schools were communicated to approach the wards of their students so that they can rate and rank them on these parameters.

This was perhaps one of the most unprecedented attempts whereby the service providers invited there service seekers to rank their performance on an open platform where they had no control or influence over the outcomes. You would, therefore, find a significant variance of participation across eduDESTINATIONS on this count. There are cities where schools couldn’t decipher the intent of the same and thereby missed the boat.

Online Presence & Social Media Footprints

In this age of online and social engagement, there are quite a number of analytics tools which present key insights about the online presence and social footprints indices which reveal a lot about the progressiveness of the brand concerned.

For measuring the online presence of the shortlisted schools, we made use of the Domain Authority metric from moz. com. Domain Authority is a score (on a 100-point scale) developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. To determine Domain Authority, moz employs machine learning against Google’s algorithm to best model how search engine results are generated. Over 40 signals are included in this calculation. This ensures that a website’s domain authority can be used as a competitive metric against other sites.

An elaborate social survey was configured on the basis of aforesaid parameters. The shortlisted schools were communicated to approach the wards of their students so that they can rate and rank them on these parameters

The online presence of all schools has to be computed on the basis of domain authority metric of moz.

Facebook has become the most ubiquitous means of stakeholder engagement. The number of facebook likes on the school page is the simplest metric to compute the social engagement being pursued. This has become the basis of Social Footprints ranking.

End Note

Every school is unique with a differentiated set of foci depending on the view of the management about the end outcomes of learning. The Best Schools of India 2015 is an earnest attempt to unravel the best aspects of each of the participating schools.

digitalLEARNING would build upon this view and approach and shall present further ranking indices on a different set of parameters in times to come. This elaborate inclusive ranking framework shall give an overview to all the stakeholders about the vivid elements of school education in the country.