Another piece in the learner-focused revolution that Paul describes is a renewed attention to outcomes of learning. ‘Outcomes-based planning and evaluation’ (OBPE) is a systematic way to plan user-centered programs and to measure whether they have achieved their goals. In a new course titled Shaping Outcomes, developed by Rachel Applegate, there is a quotation from the United Way of America that defines an outcome as:
“not how many worms the bird feeds its young, but how well the fledgling flies”
Want to find out more about the principles of OBPE?
Rachel will be presenting her ideas at a WebJunction Learning Webinar:
Thursday, May 29 at 11 AM PDT / 2 PM EDT
Registration for this webinar is optional. To register and receive an email reminder, visit the WebJunction Calendar of Events at http://evanced.info/webjunction/evanced/eventcalendar.asp.
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Questions? Email einstitute@webjunction.org with any questions.
Thanks for extending the “learner-focused revolution” discussion. It’s fascinating to read the various points of view which are floating around out there about whether training is effective–ranging from the “almost everything is useless” assertion to the idea that we can drive ourselves crazy trying to document successes which may be so subjective as to be unquantifiable. The “how well the fledgling flies” test sounds like one great way to measure the effectveness of training-teaching-learning, and might be expanded to include the question as to how many fledglings it carries with it as it begins to soar.
Paul, I like your fledgling-teach-fledgling idea. There’s nothing like teaching a concept to someone else to confirm your own understanding of it. And it emphasizes the informal and social aspects of learning.
Wish I’d been able to put this into practice a bit more in my previous position as a training director. We were exploring an “each one teach one” proposal a colleague had seen, and were hoping that we would, as part of our training program, encourage colleagues to pass on what they learned through a combination of one-on-one informal sessions and more formal, brief presentations in staff/department meetings. An extension of this which came to me recently was the idea that viral marketing could easily have a formal counterpart through the idea of “viral learning”; did a cursory bit of online searching and found few references to the term other than through a very funny satirical video (which, of course, I watched repeatedly). Perhaps all of us could engage in a bit of viral learning by promoting this idea and encouraging those already using it under less fancy terminology to spread the word of their own successes to encourage the rest of us.
What ever happened to the “each one teach one” initiative? It sounds like a great promotion of informal learning.
Thanks for the good Tuesday morning chuckle from the Viral Learning Center video.