Evaluating the community outcomes of Australian learning community initiatives: innovative approaches to assessing complex outcomes

Learning communities are towns, cities, or regions where a series of actions are implemented to enhance lifelong learning and community capacity. These efforts include improving access to further education, mentoring, increasing opportunities for informal learning, sharing skills across sectors, and supporting innovation and entrepreneurship. In Australia, over 45 learning communities are contributing to social capital, social inclusion, and local partnership development. The outcomes of learning communities have been difficult to evaluate. Evaluation frameworks have been developed to assess a range of aspects of learning community outcomes. A key approach used is the Victorian Performance Management Framework, which consists of four tiers - the function of the learning community, learning delivery, lifelong learning, and community capacity. Evaluation experiences have shown: (1) the need for comprehensive but workable frameworks; (2) the involvement of community members in developing frameworks; (3) the need for different levels of impacts to be included in evaluation; (4) evaluation needs to be iterative and part of continuous improvement; and (5) the limitations of evaluation need to be understood and mitigated.