Evidence of Learning
Before we get started on learning design, let’s take a moment to think about assessment and evaluation. How will you know that your learners have actually learned something from the learning experience that you are designing and that their learning has had an impact? What is the evidence you can look for?
If you focus on the evidence of learning from the beginning it helps you think strategically about learning, for example making sure that the a training you’re designing is aligned with your organisation's strategic focus.
Resources
This Praxis Paper from INTRAC (2015) gives tools and recommendations for monitoring and evaluation learning initiatives. It also provides a checklist to help guide you in your planning.
From the paper's conclusion: "There are steps we can follow to ensure that planning, monitoring and evaluation processes contribute to the engagement and empowerment of learners – but these are the steps which are too often skipped over as we work under time pressure. In this way, we miss vital opportunities to learn, adapt and increase the likelihood of making the desired change happen. The M&E process – when done well – helps to deepen communication, trust and understanding between stakeholders on bringing about and sustaining change."
Action Learning
Action learning is a systematized way of investigating your own practice to find out how to improve it. It is an iterative process of:
- describing a challenge
- planning an intervention
- doing the intervention
- observing changes
- reflecting
- planning a new intervention and starting again from step 1
In that sense, action learning is a way of incorporating monitoring and evaluation into a learning process. Learning is not just an abstract thing, but something that directly influences and changes your practice.
Action learning takes place in teams (sometimes called "professional communities" or "communities of practice"). More on this in the section about Networked Learning.
The best time to introduce a new training, will often be between step 5 and 6 in the list above. At this point, you have a clearly described challenge, and you have gathered the first experiences in trying to solve this challenge.
Reflection
Ask yourself these questions:
- What does success look like for my learning intervention?
- How does the learning experience that I am designing play into the strategy of my organisation/unit/team?
- Where (and when) can I look for evidence that learning has taken place and has made an impact?