There's always a lot of talk in the L&D community and in businesses about how to meaningfully evaluate learning. For years the evaluation of learning in workplaces has been driven by the Kirkpatrick model and it's 4 levels.
Let's all agree (for a moment) and call this 'good'.
But, the world of learning at work has changed. The rise of collaborative, networked learning doesn't fit so well with Kirkpatrick-style evaluation.
This morning I read Seth Godin's blog and this post "Marketing good...." and as often happens I found a link between the world of Marketing and Learning. Here are a few lines from the post (with my suggested markups included):
"As you've guessed, marketing learning evaluation good isn't actually marketing learning evaluation good, not any more. It's just junk.
Second and third order recommendations and word of mouth and the way we talk about the things that are "good good" is the new marketing learning evaluation."
So, Kirkpatrick may still be good(ish), it's just that it's not good good. There are other, new, better ways of evaluating learning effectiveness and many of these are about evaluating how learning is shared between learners.
So we must look beyond Kirkpatrick to determine learning effectiveness and one way that will be to evaluate the 'recommendations and word of mouth' between learners that point to what really is good good learning.