Season 4 Episode 9: “Fresh Insights Into Development Effectiveness:” Sheila Jagannathan, The World Bank

In our latest episode in our on-going Learning 4 Good season, where we are finding our what corporate L&D can learn from how Non-Governmental Organizations, Private Social Enterprises, and Community Organizations, who are all using Learning and ed tech to build trust and capacity for social good. We’re hearing from the people on the ground who are experimenting to help build skills and capacity in under-served populations and using learning technology and design to build relevant skills for social enterprise and humanitarian leadership, and we’ve got a perfect guest to help us do just that this week: Sheila Jagannathan, Lead Learning Specialist over at The World Bank over at Washington, DC (not an NGO, of course, but still part of the infrastructure fighting global poverty through capacity development, not building, as we’ll soon see). Sheila is also Program Manager of the Bank’s Open Learning Campus, which is part of its Development Economics Knowledge Management practice, which we hear all about in our near-hour together, as well as:

  • her person journey, which saw her being explored to the ideas of AI pioneer Seymour Pappert back at MIT in the early 1980s which led to her transferring her interests into ed tech and the forerunner of adaptive learning – Intelligent Tutoring
  • the wide span of her current responsibilities, from monitoring skills development to preparing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution
  • how her portfolio fits into the overall mission of the Bank, and the extensive profile of the people she needs to help
  • why she prefers capacity development to capacity ‘building’ – and why she thinks the latter is no longer a useful concept
  • why Learning also involves UnLearning, letting go of no longer useful ‘knowledge’
  • why investing in early childhood education could be critical for our common future
  • the importance of Learning Analytics to what she’s trying to do
  • and much more.

Resources

Learn more about The World Bank’s Open Learning Campus platform here

Read Sheila’s blog here and follow her on Twitter at @shejag

And connect with her on LinkedIn here.

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