Professional capacity and organizational change as measures of educational effectiveness: assessing the impact of postgraduate education in Development Policy and Management

Abstract

We tend to measure educational performance by students' attainment in course work or examinations. In the case of professional education, the impact of the educational programme on the students' own capacities to enhance their work practices, and the wider organizational effects of the students' education and training, are also key 'products' of the educational process. This is particularly important with education for Development Policy and Management (DPAM), which is directly concerned with capacity-building. This article adopts a work-related approach to educational effectiveness and examines four professional programmes in DPAM, three in Southern Africa and one in the UK. Analysing the results of surveys and case studies, the article demonstrates how a positive learning experience is related to the application of learning at work. However the conditions for applying learning also depend strongly on organizational context, as do the wider, organizational, impacts of learning. The article presents a broad approach to assessing educational effectiveness in professional programmes which incorporates these factors.

Development management as reflective practice

“…For us the 'particular kind of orientation' concerns learning and knowledge-building across organisations. Such a conceptualisation also provides an addendum to the study of effective learning through four Development Policy and Management Masters' Degree Programmes (including the Open University Programme of our study) carried out by Johnson and Thomas (2004). A major focus of this study was the 14 The idea that difference is a source of collective learning in relationships is developed by Johnson and Wilson (2006) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 interaction of individual student learning through their studies with the learning of the organisations for which they work.…”

Individual learning and building organisational capacity for development

“…There are some crucial factors which help ensure that individual learning is of a kind that could potentially have an organisational and developmental impact: the relevance of curriculum; and the motivation and 'learning style' of the individual learner (Johnson & Thomas, 2004).…”

“…It combined a questionnaire to course participants across the four programmes (354 responses) and to their line managers (81 responses) with 18 detailed case studies of instances where application of learning had been said to have an organisational effect (case studies 'by repute' [Thomas, 1998]). In a previous paper (Johnson and Thomas, 2004) we used the research results to discuss moving the assessment of educational effectiveness of the programmes from participants' attainment to changes in their work practice and to organisational change. Here we build on the case study data to analyse the mechanisms of interaction between individual course participants and their wider organisational and developmental contexts, to see how and in what ways individual learning can influence organisational capacity-building.…”

Developmental education for innovation: lessons from an experience in Kenya

“…This aspect underlines the importance, raised in the literature, of thinking about practice and context. On one hand, key to our project was the ability of our participants to utilise the materials and modify them in their own settings, supporting the notion that learning is not simply about a linear and codified knowledge process but one which supports learning by reflection, interaction, doing and using (Jensen et al, 2007;Johnson and Thomas, 2004;. On the other hand, our interviews with stakeholders and feedback from the workshops highlighted how the materials would be easier to embed if contextualised and made sectorally specific.…”