The Evaluation of Learning Situations

i One of the most prominent questions for us, as many other kinds of workers — is to evaluate to what extent we are able to reach our working objectives. As actors of the learning process, whether it is as teachers , trainers, tutors, IT specialists, program managers, training managers, responsible of Institutions, or whatever kind of decision maker, we are more specifically interested in evidencing the value of different learning situations. Let us first consider what we consider as " learning situations. " As is now commonly agreed in a great part of the educational community, learning takes place in a network context. The Learning Network (Figure 1) is built not only by the relationship between the actors of the learning process, but also by the relationship of these actors with different classes of actants, such as classical " tools " (books) theories, and the assessment tools for all these actors/actants. A learning situation can then be considered as an instantiation of the Learning Network within the context of a given set of learning objectives, a given pedagogical scenario, and a given set of learning activities (see Figure 2). The question of evaluation has to be considered in coherence with this representation (see Figure 3).