BackHome
Refresh: OffView Personal Schedule
Session Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

What We’re Learning About Learning Networks

Thu, March 14, 1:30 to 3:00pm, Hyatt Regency Miami, Floor: Third Level, Pearson 1

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

This panel will review approaches toward monitoring, evaluation, and learning for a donor-funded group of multi-regional education learning networks and partners. We will describe what we have learned from implementing those approaches, and how we used those approaches to improve the effectiveness of our learning networks. We also considered the delicate balance of maintaining integrity as a set of formal learning networks with specific, contracted objectives, while trying to approach our work as a Community of Practice that takes guidance from, and responds to, the network members we aim to serve.

Much has been written and discussed regarding what constitutes a Community of Practice (CoP), how that differs from a Learning Network (LN), and what are effective approaches for each. In short, a learning network is a facilitated, peer-to-peer learning approach that can be highly effective at documenting and sharing knowledge between donors and implementing partners to help strengthen a particular technical area (USAID Learning Lab, 2021). Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. Learning that takes place through a CoP is not necessarily intentional (Baptista & Sherman, 2018).

Our global entity is a set of formal LNs with global representation. As a contract for a major donor, the project must deliver on discrete objectives to a specific audience. At the same time, we think about how we may approach our work in the way that CoPs do, meaning we listen to our members and remain flexible and adaptable so we can respond to members’ needs. For example, we have introduced a regular concept note process that allows members to submit their innovative and impactful ideas for activities that they hope we will support.

To be responsive to our members, it is imperative we have excellent systems for measuring our success so we can adjust accordingly. There is limited literature on methods for measuring success of CoPs and LNs (see van der Meijden & Jansen, 2010; Gonçalves, 2023; Baker & Beams 2016). A majority of it focuses on CoPs, and very little is specific to the international development or education sector. As such, our entity’s approach has evolved with the project’s implementation. We based it first on what we are obligated to report on to our funder, and second, what has been most useful for each of the LNs and regional chapters in deciding what they do, with whom, and how. What is useful for our LNs depends on their goals and outcomes, which may evolve as we hear from members.

Our project has discrete goals and outcomes, and we need to measure those goals and outcomes as part of our contract. Accordingly, our theory of change and associated outcomes are clear: If we produce high quality and relevant resources and distribute them effectively, members will access them, apply them to their work, and that application will ultimately improve their practice as they work on education programming. However, “improve their practice” can mean a lot of things depending on the LN and can vary depending on the resource produced by the LN. For example, our entity may produce a white paper to inform a small set of policymakers in one country about one important piece of evidence related to the case for increased funding for early childhood education. Also, our entity may produce a webcast in four languages that aims to provide a global audience with a new lens for thinking about how to incorporate building social-emotional skills in primary school. In both these cases, the way we measure success, and our desired outcomes, will differ. To account for this flexibility in what we do, we have developed measurement approaches for both examples. Meanwhile, aiming to take on CoP components within our boundaries as a formal LN, we continue to adjust what we produce, and for whom, based on member demand. Importantly, our monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) approaches continue to evolve, explicitly allowing for and flexibly measuring the varying audiences to whom a product is directed and the varying ways resources may be applied, so we can say practice has improved.

Our entity’s generalized process for measuring these components across all of our varied activities occurs in three stages: a) conducting some variety of needs assessment so we know what product we need and for which portion of our network; b) when the product is released, seeing who accessed it; c) in the weeks or months following that release, seeing what people who accessed it did with it (i.e., whether they applied it and whether it contributed to improved practice).

This panel will share five papers with examples of findings we’ve reflected on and adjusted approaches accordingly. For example:
- Who are our entity’s different “user types” and what do they want? Does this differ across learning networks or regions? What have we offered them in response? When offering the product they “wanted,” was it used? Why or why not?
- How does trust amongst practitioners or organizations factor into building and nurturing LNs and CoPs, and how do LNs and CoPs impact that trust? What discrete activities/products lead to high quality connections between people? Between organizations?
- What factors determine whether a knowledge product is widely used by the group to which it was directed?

On a bigger scale, we hope our method of measuring our entity’s activity-specific outcomes, and then consolidating those learnings on a macro-scale, will enable us to see successes and learn what the main barriers are in sharing and using knowledge in a formal learning network.

Sub Unit

Chair

Individual Presentations

Discussant