– Learn a new powerful research method together with a strong community of change-makers – both scholars and learning developers

– This method allows you to understand the underlying root causes of people’s behaviour, especially during periods of change

– Written reflections make learning and personal development visible in a powerful yet simple way – you get to see inside people’s minds

This training gives you the opportunity to deepen your knowledge in an everyday research method called Designed Action Sampling (DAS). This is a research method particularly suitable for practitioners, in that it turns everyday emotional action into analysable evidence in a straightforward way.

You will learn to become a study leaders in DAS who co-design actions tasks for participants who then take action and then write micro-reflections. This results in big-and-thick longitudinal mixed datasets, which trigger deep insights among participants through collective analysis.

DAS is a widely used method, and has helped thousands of leaders in a varitey of sectors to make action-based learning and development processes more visible.

A DAS study consists of three steps: (1) designing actions for others who then (2) take action and (3) sample the impact afterwards. Each study involves two roles; one to five study leaders and around 15-100 participants. Study leaders can be professional development leaders, managers, experts, teachers, principals, coaches or scholars. Participants can be employees, students, teachers or others who take part in a process characterized by uncertainty and learning. The three steps are as follows:

• Design. In the first step, the study leaders design 5-15 action-oriented tasks for a group of participants. It should be tasks deemed suitable, meaningful and developmental for them.
• Action. Then the participants are invited to take action and try out the tasks in practice, and reflect in writing afterwards. All participants receive individual feedback from the study leaders on each reflection.
• Sampling. Finally, in the third step, study leaders and participants together analyse the sample of around 75-1500 written micro-reflections. They articulate insights gained and re-design the tasks so that they might work better next time. Then it starts over again.

DAS is described in many different publications – a recent book in Swedish, a couple of book chapters and a published journal article. There are also many published studies and book chapters where DAS has been used as a method to collect and analyse data.

Designed Action Sampling has been used for many different purposes, in education as well as in working life, and by researchers as well as by practitioners. A commonality is that the methodology helps make learning and development processes visible, and that it can empower social science endeavours. Whenever human learning is a key component of a scholarly or practical purpose, the method can be useful. Some organisational applications of DAS seen so far, involving employees (such as teachers), include:

• Strengthen employees’ skills development by weaving it into their everyday worklife and scientifically monitoring its effects
• Replace employee surveys with digital trustful manager-employee dialogues
• Follow group learning in a collective form with a scientific methodology
• Conduct social experiments with customers to better understand value creation processes
• Quality improvement by scrapping some internal reports and replace with reflection-based collective analysis

Some educational applications of DAS seen so far, involving students, include:

• Facilitate action-based pedagogy from preschool through primary / secondary school to university level
• Support reflective assessment in action-based education such as vocational education / training (VET)
• Help teachers who work with work-integrated learning as a key part of their pedagogical approach

– > After completed training, you will have a plan for how to lead your organisation’s first DAS study.

This is a 100% free 10-week training, consisting of reading a short handbook in DAS, watching tailored videos and carrying out various action tasks that help you plan a DAS study in your context. The process consists of ten simple steps across 10 weeks, all of which you can examine here and now in detail. All material is available on this website for you to delve into at any time.

If you decide to join the training, you simply join a group in our reflective platform Loopme where you write a short reflection for each of the ten steps. For each step, you then receive some feedback from our training leaders.

Each week you will also receive an email from us with all to-dos expected for that week. You need to set aside around 1 hour a week for your own professional development to be able to follow this training. It is a big advantage if you are two or more people from the same organization participating, because then you can discuss all steps with them.

The training starts when you decide it to start. If you are more than one person starting, make sure to join the training at the same time, since it starts immediately – automatically – after you sign up.

You start simply by joining a reflection group in our reflection platform Loopme. Use this link to join a group now. When a group becomes full, we will replace this link with a new link to a new group:

[Link to Loopme group – to be put here later]

If you want to examine the action tasks in this group, you can look at the Loopme content package here first:

[Link to the Loopme package – to be put here later]

• We will provide individual digital feedback on your reflections after completed action tasks.
• We will try to also provide support on the study plans you develop as part of this training, but if we end up in time constraints, we will prioritize those study plans which we find the most interesting and well-prepared.

Participants in this training tend to be engaged change-makers who share a passion for innovative development of research, practice and learning. This builds up a strong community of action-oriented scholars and learning-oriented change-makers who help each other to succeed in a broad variety of contexts. You will be invited to join this community upon completion of the DAS training.

All participants who have completed the training receive a certificate via Everyday Institute.

How can this all be free? Well, Everyday Institute is a non-profit organisation with a clear aim to spread research on how people can embed learning into their everyday working environment. Therefore, this training programme is perhaps the most important thing we can do. As long as we can support the volumes, we will provide it for free.

If you complete the training, there is a “risk” that you will become very interested to do additional things that will cost some small money. But that will then be completely up to you. It is absolutely possible to continue using DAS without any cost whatsoever. But you might become so “hooked” that you want to go and find a small budget for:

• Community cost. Joining a community of DAS change-makers. There is a small yearly fee to cover the practical work associated to this. You can join or leave any year. You must have completed the training to join (or provide evidence of moderate experience in DAS).
• Digital tool cost. Using a reflective tool to collect data through DAS studies – you can choose which tool you like, but we are only aware of one tool so far which is 100% tailored to DAS, and that is Loopme. They charge a small fee for using this tool to cover the cost of programmers making this tool available and to support users.

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to gain expert knowledge about how you can strengthen your organization’s development capacity with a new and powerful scientific methodology.