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Teaching Notes for WikiRate Research Assignment

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Teach Corporate Social Responsibility in:

…Reporting

…Transparency

…Assessment

…Regulation

WikiRate is a free, open platform for collaborative research, making it a useful classroom tool for students of higher education, and even school students to engage in practical learning. Students gain first-hand knowledge of the nature of sustainability reporting, and learn about company and stakeholder materiality.

Assignments are developed around sets of Metrics and Companies. Metrics are a way of asking the same question of many companies in order to measure company performance. Metrics help make company sustainability data structured and comparable, so that it can be used to develop deeper insights into sustainability performance. Companies on WikiRate are: a legal entity that you can't hug (see detailed definition here). This means that NGOs and Universities, for example, also fall under the “Company” category, and make for interesting research subjects.

Metrics cover a wide range of sustainability topics: from human rights issues like conflict minerals or modern slavery to Environmental, Social and Governance issues covered by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) metrics.

The basic idea is that engaging students in WikiRate research provides a number of benefits to learning, including:

  • Deeper understanding of corporate social responsibility strategies, how they are applied, tracked and reported, and why they are important.

  • Knowledge on how companies use standards like the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) in reporting

  • Complexity of understanding corporate contributions to achieving the SDGs, and how they can be tracked with available metrics and data.

  • Awareness of need for full transparency in reporting

  • Grasp of an individual’s opportunities to contribute research to a global, public resource where the data is open and available for others to use.

Working online in a public place allows the possibility to interact with peers conducting similar research, and discuss company transparency and sustainability topics.

Standards for Reporting

“the Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI) G3, and more recently G4, standards have the greatest levels of adoption by companies. The G4 defines 58 General Standard Disclosures, and 91 indicators for measuring sustainability impacts. The G4 guidelines state that companies should report on all of the 91 sustainability indicators that they deem material (relevant) to their business. Companies that follow the GRI standards can declare that their report is in accordance with that standard if it meets certain criteria.”

Assignment structure

By analysing company performance through annual company sustainability reports and Communication on Progress (COP) reports submitted to the UN Global Compact by business participants, students will gain an understanding of corporate sustainability and issues of subjectivity, contextualisation of data, and comparability. Data will be extracted from company sustainability or COP reports and added to the open WikiRate platform, where it will help the UN Global Compact in its efforts to track and assess business contributions to and impact on the SDGs.

This exercise requires two phases of research:

  1. Research 1 or more companies according to the metrics in the course’s Project page on WikiRate: http://wikirate.org/Projects

  2. Check values for another company that has been researched by a fellow student. There is a mechanism on WikiRate for “double-checking” metric values.

Course preparation

  • Deadline for completion of the first stage of research (provided by Professor). Because students will be checking the work of another student, the second phase requires the first phase - research of one company - to be completed.

  • A list of companies for research will be provided by WikiRate.

  • Students must add themselves to their Research Group according to their class before they begin conducting research through their Project page. This page captures student progress on one place.

Keep in mind

  • Preliminary/interim deadlines can help focus students’ time, depending on their level.

  • Assessment

Student Assessment

We suggest for assessment that participation-based grading is a good option. Student activity can be tracked through WikiRate on Research Groups where students will add their usernames. The two main relevant activities are: number of answers provided (metric values), and the number of discussions added (there is a comment field next to every answer where students should provide context such as quotes, calculations and page numbers). Bespoke options for assessment, can be discussed as required.

Project examples

University of Western Australia: SDG5 - Gender_Equality

UWA used GRI Metrics that had been mapped to the SDG Compass, to look at company performance according to SDG5: Gender Equality.

Investigating Mineral Sourcing Practices

Amnesty International CUAI and the Cambridge WikiRate Society designed this project to research how companies around the world use minerals that are potentially linked to conflict and exploitation.

UK Modern Slavery Act Research

The Walk Free Foundation designed metrics based on the