The Open University through its platform OpenLearn has a series of free courses called BOCs
(Badged Open Courses). Obtaining the badge when successfully completed,
this short can be put to a range of purposes: gaining prior credit;
continuing professional development etc.
My OU colleague Andy Lane has led the development of a new BOC, now available, called Mastering systems thinking in practice. It is ideally suited to those who think our OU STiP programme (postgraduate awards in Systems Thinking in Practice) may be relevant but wish to have a taster before committing to full-blown OU study/modules.
Ray Ison, Professor in Systems at the UK Open University since 1994, is a member of the Applied Systems Thinking in Practice Group. From 2008-15 he also developed and ran the Systemic Governance Research Program at Monash University, Melbourne. In this blog he reflects on contemporary issues from a systemic perspective.
Friday, November 10, 2017
Thursday, November 09, 2017
PhD thesis of interest - Andrew Mitchell
I have recently become aware of a thesis completed by Andrew Mitchell at De Montfort University called "Second-order learning in developmental evaluation for community-based sustainability" Here is a copy of the abstract:
Using this base, a prototype DE framework was designed and provisionally field-tested in the form of a set of prompts to be used with CBS practitioners to augment traditional monitoring and evaluation activities. This framework is intended to support practitioners in surfacing and capturing second-order learning about their practices and to explore opportunities for innovative responses to dynamic complex operational conditions.
Recommendations are offered for further research and how these findings might be incorporated into future CBS design and funding considerations."
ABSTRACT:
"It
is increasingly common for complex social, economic and
environmental policy concerns to be delivered via funded
community-based projects. A project’s contribution is typically
monitored and evaluated relative to pre-defined
outcomes, supported by a set of indicators. Available
research suggests that when judged against such criteria,
the performance of many funded international developmental and
community-based sustainability (CBS) projects are variable, with
evidence suggesting that changes elicited are negligible in
duration, type, and scale. However, evaluating project performance
relative to pre-defined outcomes may overlook the
practical learning accumulated
by actors in realising key objectives under conditions afforded by the
operational context. To address this gap, developmental
evaluation (DE) foregrounds and supports project practitioner
learning and innovation under dynamic, complex, and uncertain
operating conditions. Applying the DE focus on project actor
learning and innovation, the present research thematically
analyses how practitioners in a funded CBS case study project make sense
of their practice. Despite its explicit focus on learning
however, DE has not articulated a coherent cognitive
paradigm, and a contribution of the present study is to
equip DE with a conceptual architecture drawn from the enactive
cognitive science paradigm, rooted in an explicit
accounting of complexity. Using this base, a prototype DE framework was designed and provisionally field-tested in the form of a set of prompts to be used with CBS practitioners to augment traditional monitoring and evaluation activities. This framework is intended to support practitioners in surfacing and capturing second-order learning about their practices and to explore opportunities for innovative responses to dynamic complex operational conditions.
Recommendations are offered for further research and how these findings might be incorporated into future CBS design and funding considerations."
Paper from Francis Meynell's PhD
I cannot remember if I have put a link here to the work done by Francis Meynell in his PhD supervised by me and Chris Blackmore. If not here is a link to the only paper published thus far from the thesis.
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