The NetEduProject - Research and development project

Today there is a big consensus around the idea that educational systems around the globe are not simply broken but inefficient to meet the needs of the present and future generation (UNESCO, 2015). A global challenge that faces the NetEduProject is to turn around the inefficiency and low capacities for change of educational systems around the globe. Educational Systems are based in stiff, disconnected and fragmented structures, that in turn favour an individual and isolated professional culture. Thus educational organizations are unable to find solutions beyond the School walls and are not proficient to take an authentic advantage of social relations and community capacities. This fact also inhibits greater collaboration between Schools and Universities to learn and apply new knowledge in the field.

This same idea is also empowered by the educational systems around the globe that are providing a wide range of assessment tools specially related to student's achievement -reading, writing and maths-. On the other hand, there is a global lack of assessment tools that focus on documenting School’s ability to engage with the whole community, build trust and collaborate towards lifting local educational challenges. The silo structure and culture of the system are major challenges as they block the mobilization and exchange of resources within the system -as information, ideas, talents, knowledge, best practices, among many others- and the way these resources travel around and impact children, professionals, organizations, communities and the whole system. So it really impacts the way we act but also the way we learn from one another, and the way an organization learns to better achieve their educational goals. NetEduProject believes that empowering leaders to focus on social interaction, linking real needs to interconnected resources will make the difference in children’s lives.

NetEduProject is an emerging community of educational leaders committed to transform their own organizations into high performance, inclusive, collaborative and innovative ecosystems to better respond to today’s thrilling challenges. The project provides the NetEdu Tool which is validated, practice based, international, oriented to improvement, easy to manage and free to use.

The tool allows leaders to evaluate the health and potential of their School educational community across eight dimensions: Empathic Communication, Trust, Shared Commitment, Horizontality, Collaboration, Innovation, Equity and Personalized Learning, collecting information from teachers, staff, community professionals, parents, families and students who respond to an online survey. Once the responses are gathered, the tool automatically displays in a dashboard the ecosystem’s potential. Besides the diagnosis, the tool serves formative functions by showing the strengths and weaknesses of the ecosystem aiming to facilitate global understanding and organize leaders priorities. It provides useful, personalized and transformational tips as strategies oriented to improve the leader’s capacities to take advantage of the resources embedded in the ecosystem. Finally, the NetEdu is meant to be a Citizen Science project where leaders co-create new knowledge in real time by rating the tips, sharing their own experience to illustrate their process of change and also interacting with one another. The project integrates the whole community by collecting, updating, catalyzing and sharing all these change experiences, activating a circular process of collective knowledge and collective impact to inspire leaders to better respond to their own educational challenges.

The NetEduProject brings validated and relevant research to the practical use of leaders from Schools. For this purpose, the evaluation model is research validated, but at the same time current leaders from different countries have helped to adapt language and processes to maximize the usability of knowledge. At the time that leaders are using and taking advantage of the tool, the platform collects new data that will be used to generate meaningful and updated content to support their change efforts, nurturing a circular process of action-research that provides exponential impact.

NetEduProject is not a simple diagnostic tool but has a clear transformative focus. A smooth, simple and self-guided interaction empowers educational leaders to pilot their learning processes autonomously without the help of external consultants. Also, the personalized tips that leaders receive from the analysis improve their own leadership strategies, facilitating the ecosystem growth and goal achievement. Finally, NetEduProject has a GLOCAL approach where GLOBAL leaders from around the world use the same evaluation model, but receive tips adapted to their own LOCAL context. This way leaders can take advantage both from a rich global exchange and from an accurate and contextualized orientation.

Thus NetEduProject community are school leaders and researchers around the world willing to learn from one another and collaborate to enhance real educational change and impact. School leaders can evaluate and improve their organization performance, enhancing their connections inside and outside their organization, bringing new learning opportunities for children and all the community, increasing collaboration, inclusion, social capital and the whole innovative potential. Educational researchers can also benefit from partnering with the NetEduProject and support the community, as they can both support the use of the tool for research purposes, and access the whole data generated by the project to use it in their investigations.

Users can learn about the leadership of educational ecosystems visiting www.neteduproject.org and watch videos, read blog posts and follow ‘Change Stories’ from other leaders that are using the NetEduProject. If leaders want to experience a transformational adventure they will need to engage their own organization and community in the ‘Ecosystem diagnosis’ as part of the transformative process. To start, leaders will need to sign in and fill organization’s profile with brief descriptive information. Once the profile is completed leaders will be technically able to run the analysis and access the video guides to support the self-guided process. The tool will generate a message to all the community with a link to the survey, and leaders will have to add all emails of the respondents -professionals, staff, volunteers, families, youth- and then click on ‘send’. Respondents will receive the survey link via email and will take 15 minutes to respond. Once the tool has the responses will automatically display results in the dashboard, and leaders will easily see the ‘Ecosystem diagnosis’ pictured by levels of ‘collaboration, horizontality, transversality, trust, participation, joint commitment and innovation’. Leaders will also find strengths and weaknesses of the ecosystem and useful tips as leadership strategies to increase the levels and optimize the ecosystem performance. Leaders will also have a space to validate tips and share ‘Change Stories’.