The Evaluator’s Program Description (EPD) is a possible starting point for the evaluator. It is a statement prepared by the evaluator after working with stakeholders to amplify and clarify all aspects of the program, including goals, objectives, activities, and anticipated outcomes.

The EPD makes the assumption that:
a) the program cycle has been addressed; program needs have been identified and plans have been devided to address them by generating new activities or altering old ones,
b) standards have been clearly stated, imposed by the parent organisation, sponsor or the staff themselves. The standards are the yardstick by which the program activities/outcomes are measured.

The EPD:
a) reveals the goals and objectives of the program,
b) allows the evaluator to know and record the activities that are planned to accomplish the goals and objectives,
c) reveals the measurement tools.

EPDs are different for each recipient of the report as their goals/objectives for the program may be different.

During interviews with each stakeholder, the evaluator discusses what the stakeholder’s goals and objectives are for the program. The evaluator questions the stakeholder to clarify precisely what it is that the program is supposed to do, the activities that are to be undertaken to make this happen, and and how the stakeholder will know that the objective has been met. This informal gap analysis allows the evaluator to build an evaluation design from each stakeholder’s perspective. This design may include: evaluation questions, program objectives, project activities to observe, data sources, population to sample, data collection design, data analysis, who is responsible for the data collection, and the audience.

d. Discuss your proposed Evaluation Report course project in light of what you have learned in the last few B&D chapters and/or from your participation in the discussions the past few weeks. Anything changed? Unexpected problems identified? Etc. Minimum 250 words. No maximum

The biggest issue that is affecting my work is the lack of a solid IT program in other areas of the school; changes in these are having an effect in what I am trying to do with the IT training program that I had developed, and am now shifting to compensate for.

My school, up to 1 week ago, was adamant that we were retaining our current Virtual Learning Platform despite my observations that it was not fit for purpose over the past year. Now, the new Head-Teacher and the Learning Technology Leader (LTL) have opened up the possibility that we will stop using it and use Google Classroom instead.

I mentioned in the discussion last week that we needed to “stop flogging the dead horse” and indeed that may actually be happening at last :)

My new knowledge and understanding of Gap Analysis caused me to suggest that we perform such an analysis. I have pointed out that we need to decide what the VLP is supposed to do for us and where we want to be in 2 years time. We have more needs than Google Classroom can provide and alternative solutions need to be put in place, if not by a new VLP, a Google Sites solution that will need to be built to replace our large repository of resources for our students to access.

The LTL wants a “quick win” and doesn’t feel the need for a gap analysis; I fear this decision will come back to bite us in the not too distant future.

The training program that has been designed incorporates our VLP, but very view people have begun to use it with their students. I am now in a situation where I need to decide whether I drop the current VLP off the training program and wait to see what happens next!

Last week’s look at the program cycle made me consider formative evaluation with a view to stopping or maintaining the Lunch-time Drop-in sessions I have organised. I built a short evaluation survey of which 40% of the staff completed.  I was concerned that I was wasting the time of people who were manning the sessions since so few people were ‘dropping-in’; I needed the data to support my decision:

• 5 of 36 respondents had dropped-in,

Despite only 14% of respondents actually using the drop-ins, 64% of the sample believe we should continue. Anecdotally, I would have stopped the training sessions, but I would have misjudged the staff sentiment toward them; I will continue the drop-ins for another 2 weeks up until half-term, when I will begin the more focussed sessions after school.