The following insights are an excerpt from our Digital Social Impact Best Practice Audit:

• adequately prepared and interactive course content (Deshpande & Chukhlomin, 2017) leads to project success and high course quality, including appropriate outputs and easily understandable content (Albebisi & Yusop, 2019)
• for content taught online, Polasek and Javorcik (2019) suggest processing teaching material in small separate units of five to seven minutes due to the retentiveness of the students
• the teaching style has a high impact on the project’s success
• getting the main stakeholders involved is deemed to be necessary.
• Imperial et al. (2007) found out that regular feedback loops from the instructor and the community partner influence the overall success because the stakeholders can thus contribute to and shape the project.
• including the partner in the co-design can ensure that the deliverables match the partner’s needs (Mattson & Wood, 2014)
• the service-learning experience should enhance the students’ learning (Pawlowski, 2018); otherwise, it may not provide the desired learning experience
• the importance of regular support and feedback for students is underlined by a study by Albebisi and Yusop (2019)
• the instructor should ensure that the students can create a noticeable impact in the community and see how the community partner benefits from their work (Imperial et al., 2007). Seeing the impact of their work can motivate the students to engage in such projects more often and thereby increase their civic responsibility (Imperial et al., 2007)
• the topic of the digital social impact project should help build the respective skills for their career interests because students additionally decide their enrolment based on their interests (Deshpande & Chukhlomin, 2017)
• insufficient prior knowledge poses a barrier for students to participate in the project properly (Alariqi et al., 2019) and can endanger the project’s success. One way to address this is to be flexible enough in the course design so that different knowledge levels can participate
• the instructor needs to start searching for a suitable partner well before the semester because the partner should be involved in the project directly from the beginning (Pawlowski, 2018). Petkus (2000)
• Saud (2021) found out that the distance to the partner has a noticeable impact on the students’ motivation.

• lack of funding can impede certain types of project concepts
• technological constraints can represent barriers to students’ engagement and collaboration and thus to the eventual success of the course (Naveed et al., 2020)
• infrastructure, is especially relevant for digital settings, which heavily rely on suitable IT equipment covering the “requirements (software and hardware) of student, faculty, and community” (Musa et al., 2017, p. 103)
• lack of educator expertise can pose a barrier to the success of service-learning implementations (Alariqi et al., 2019). However, Xiangling and Zheng (2019) state that non-academics lacking the necessary knowledge can guide projects as efficiently as academics after being taught on the subject. Hence, it can be assumed that the service projects are not implemented successfully without proper guidance from the instructor.