#  Scaling Impact Across Learner & Context Variability 

 





 Semester:   Spring 

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 Year offered:  2025 

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 Link: [Course Website](https://locator.tlt.harvard.edu/course/gse-218834/2025/spring1/16143) 

 

 

 

Variability is inevitable. As innovations scale across settings, their impact tends to diminish as they encounter different needs and situations. To scale impact successfully, innovations must anticipate relevant variables and design mechanisms to foster the conditions for success across different learners and their contexts. T522M is a studio environment where students receive personalized mentorship and peer support in working to make their existing projects or products more inclusive. Students will define the Impact Ecosystem(s) - including learners, users, and customers - in which their innovations must thrive. Through user interviews and testing, students will clarify the values of different members of the ecosystem and target specific, critical constructs - knowledge, skills, dispositions - that must change (and for whom) to drive impact. Students will mock-up and test mechanisms to cause change in the face of anticipated construct-relevant learner and context variability. Students will emerge with a plan for addressing variability; comfort leveraging existing research, domain experts, and members of the Impact Ecosystem to inform their development; and familiarity with a process of Evidence Centered Design to generate evidence of change.  
*Logistics: Enrollment is limited to 25. In addition to class meetings, students are required to schedule and attend 30-minute weekly one-on-one mentoring sessions (which may be online or in-person) with a member of the teaching team.*