We understand that effective learning is that in which the students, at the end of the pedagogical experience, are in a position to do something different.
In other words, change somehow!
Learning, to paraphrase Habermas, is driven by constitutive interests; yet courses taken in leisure time have the goal of being able to do something by finishing, tending your garden, playing a musical instrument, or baking a cake.
Is knowledge enough in adult education?
Or it is insufficient if it is not accompanied by action!
Even amazing learning experiences can be rendered useless if learners can't do something different after their completion. Whether it is using a new point of view in solving a problem; understanding a context that resonates with action and motivates change; or applying a new procedural principle that improves performance.
We agree with Julie Dirksen on this point, a good learning experience is one in which the student emerges from it with new or improved skills that they can apply to the real world and that help them do something they need or want to do.
Knowledge and action, together, are the principle of transformation!
But to build this kind of learning requires much more than content; it requires clarity about what the educational experience is being designed for, where we want to go (results), where the student is (starting point), what are the gaps that prevent students from achieving the results, and what didactic strategies made it possible to achieve them.
Effective adult learning is built by focusing on what students need to do rather than what they need to know; focusing on the outcome helps integrate and make sense of the various curriculum components, motivating students to engage in the educational journey.
We need to understand and define what effective learning means in our contexts, to assess student success beyond the superficiality of a simple satisfaction assessment or a content assessment.
Kirkpatrick's model, can represent a good guide for designing, building and evaluating learning processes.
The student satisfaction evaluation, massively applied nowadays, constitutes the basis of the process. The intrinsic motivation generated by the satisfaction that a good activity produces is the engine of learning, generating engagement, openness to new ideas, participation, and the resilience needed to make the effort to build the sought-after results.
For this reason, we consider satisfaction evaluation indispensable, but not sufficient, after all the central objective of the learning experience is learning. To what degree did participants build the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values expected on their journey? Did they learn what they had to learn, at the defined level of proficiency and sophistication?
And more than that, has this learning changed anything in the participants to the point of changing their practice? To what degree are participants applying what they have learned during the learning experience?
The means has become the end, and many educational experiences only seek the satisfaction of the learners, they have lost sight of why the formative process contributes to the development of new or improved skills that help the participants to do something they need or want to do.
But... assuming that these capabilities have been developed and are being applied in practice a new question arises. Did they really contribute to achieving the results initially defined? If the design of the journey was well done, the answer will tend to be affirmative; now, if the initial diagnosis was not well done, possibly after all this effort and investment of time and resources, the answer will be negative.
We must consider that a successful educational experience does not always involve the student knowing more, sometimes it consists of developing or improving skills, or strengthening the motivation of the participants. Sometimes the problem is gaps in communication, leadership, or direction; but on other occasions the problem is rooted in organizational impediments.
This is a dimension that is rarely highlighted in educational projects, what was the result of all this effort? Whether considering organizational or personal wants and needs, to what degree did the learning journey contribute to achieving them?
Without knowing where we are going and what we are looking for, it is very difficult to design good learning experiences, and even more difficult to know to what degree all the personal and organizational effort has paid off.
Want to know more? See the Smart Learning Concept.
