Pearson’s Efficacy Listening Tour

Back around New Year, Michael wrote a post examining Pearson’s efficacy initiative and calling on the company to engage in active discussions with various communities within higher education about defining “efficacy” with educators rather than for educators. It turns out that post got a fair bit of attention within the company. It was circulated in a company-wide email from CEO John Fallon, and the blog post and all the comments were required reading for portions of the company leadership. After a series of discussions with the company, we, through our consulting company, have been hired by Pearson to facilitate a few of these conversations. We also asked for and received permission to blog about them. Since this is an exception to our rule that we don’t blog about our paid engagements, we want to tell you a little more about the engagement, our rationale for blogging about it, and the ground rules.

The project itself is fairly straightforward. We’re facilitating conversations with a few different groups of educators in different contexts. The focus of each conversation is how they define and measure educational effectiveness in their respective contexts. There will be some  discussion of Pearson’s efficacy efforts at a high level, but mainly for the purpose of trying to map what the educators are telling us about their practices to how Pearson is thinking about efficacy in the current iteration of their approach. After doing a few of these, we’ll bring together the participants along with other educators in a culminating event. At this meeting, the participants will hear a summary of the lessons learned from the earlier conversations, learn a bit more about Pearson’s efficacy work, and then break up into mixed discussion groups to provide more feedback on how to move the efficacy conversation forward and how Pearson’s own efforts can be improved to make them maximally useful to educators.

Since both e-Literate readers and Pearson seemed to get a lot of value from our original post on the topic, we believe there would be value in sharing some of the ongoing conversation here as well. So we asked for and received permission from Pearson to blog about it. Here are the ground rules:

• We are not getting paid to blog and are under no obligation to blog.
• Our blog posts do not require prior editorial review by Pearson.
• Discussions with Pearson during the engagement are considered fair game for blogging unless they are explicitly flagged as otherwise.
• On the other hand, we will ask for Pearson customers for approval prior to writing about their own campus initiatives (and, in fact, will extend that courtesy to all academic participants).

The main focus of these posts, like the engagement itself, is likely to be on how the notion of efficacy resonates (or doesn’t) with various academic communities in various contexts. Defining and measuring the effectiveness of educational experiences—when measurement is possible and sensible—is a subject with much broader application’s than Pearson’s product development, which is why we are making an exception to our blogging recusal policy for our consulting engagements and why we appreciate Pearson giving us a free hand to write about what we learn.