Evaluation Time

I'm currently doing a lot of evaluation.  Both Newcastle and Essex have asked me to undertake longer-term evaluation (ie of all cohorts to date over several years) of their respective 'Futures' programmes.  Indeed, they have agreed to share results and learning, which is good collaborative stuff!

We're starting with a Survey Monkey survey, to get some quantitative and some qualitative data, and then following that up with interviews, to enrich the qualitative.
I've also just completed a pilot, with two cohorts, of an Academic Leadership Programme with Northumbria University, and of course that needs to be evaluated too.

One of the issues, particularly with the Academic Leadership programme, is that the Learning Objectives were not tightly articulated at the start.

But Andrew, you gasp, why did you not do that?  It is text book stuff!

Well, perhaps - but perhaps the text books are wrong.  In this case, the reason was clear and, I think, right.  I wanted the participants on the event to have a large part in designing the programme as we progressed, to ensure that we were addressing the issues that they identified as most important to them.

It's a great way of ensuring both relevance and commitment (or 'buy-in' as I suppose the text book would have it) but it does mean you sometimes go in directions not initially foreseen - which is of course the point...