Project evaluation
30-Jun-07
On Monday 25th June I went to an ALT workshop on evaluating projects.
I chose to concentrate on the evaluation of a pilot of the e-portfolio software PebblePad. It looks like we will pilot with staff and a few students in the Autumn Semester 2007 and then have further pilots based on using it within modules in the Spring Semester 2008. If all goes well we can roll it out to all in the Autumn Semester 2008.
Some interesting points were made including:
- Who is the audience for the project?
- Is there more than one audience?
- How will the evaluation differ for different audiences?
This got me thinking about how to show that the project was working to all stakeholders including managers, staff and students. It looks like I will need at least two different sorts of evaluation instrument, managers are more interested in quantitative evaluations which say what percentage of people said what whereas the users of the project are more interested in qualitative evaluation involving issues around learning, ease of use, workload etc.
It looks as if we need to show that the project is successful two these different audiences but there will be some overlap as getting a good evaluation against the student and staff criteria will mean that more people will want to use the software and therefore it is more likely to be deemed a success by managers.