What Exactly Are Indicators?

Yesterday I attended a seminar by Douglas Bourn of the Development Education Association (DEA), a self-styled "umbrella" organisation working in the UK. Douglas was at the University of Leicester to discuss with people from this and other Universities about how we may integrate Development Education and the broader Sustainable Development (SD) agenda into UK Higher Education (HE). Douglas has a refreshing participant-centred delivery style, often asking us to break off into small groups to discuss some of the issues. His insights were mostly well elucidated and relevant although I felt obliged at one point to question his question asking us to consider how we would ideally integrate three common UK Government level SD initiatives into HE. In my frank opinion the days of idealism should now be far behind us and pragmatic, realistic approaches should only be entertained. However, in retrospect maybe this was simply a rhetorical trick on Douglas's part, I'm sure he realises the seriousness of today's situation.

I just emailed Douglas to point out my own attempt at a pragmatic approach, " Contextualisation of Virtual Learning in the Global Marketplace", to Education for Sustainable Development (EfSD) through online education based on my research at the UNU Global Virtual University. I'll write more about this sometime but in terms of the pragmatics the conclusions between pages 49 and 53 and the final recommendations on page 58 may be of use.

Anyway, aside from the talk Douglas also brought a selection of material. Of interest to this Blog is the DEA's work on indicators for Development Education, "Measuring Effectiveness in Development Education". Please click on "key concepts" for the descriptions of indicators. This website/"toolkit" is an outstanding piece of work: succinct, clear and sufficiently 'high level' to be of more generic use.

Of course, the work still needs to be done to map all these indicators and knowledge of designing indicators onto the matter at hand, notably the UN DESD in the Asia-Pacific.