As a lot of you know I am heavily involved in JISC funded project termed ‘Making Assessment Count’. Today, we just finished our third CAMEL cluster meeting and it, as always, has provided food for thought. It was great to see everyone again and good to know we are all at the same stage of project deployment. Whilst, these meetings works under ‘Chatham House Rules’ there was a lot of food for thought. We focused on the areas of sustainability and evaluation and really how these two linked concepts can be measured. A question I asked and have been pondering ever since is:
What is the definition of a successful project?
A superficial answer would be: ‘a project that did was it said it was going to do’, but I would argue that ‘successful’ is subjective and therefore is the evaluation of success dependent upon the person to whom we report to? For example, in our work we have (in conjunction with corporate services), development a scalable tool for the integration of coursework feedback with a new model of reflection feeding into our face-to-face tutoring scheme. This is a success. Did we get 100% compliance with staff and students? No; but is this a failure? We did have excellent staff and student engagement (something we are proud of) and this needs to be shown in any evaluation. So I suppose the question to be asked is: Is our evaluation strategy inclusive so that it offers a valid reference for other people to help inform their practise?
