Program & Practice Evaluation

This course was packed to the gills with content for a spring and summer course.  I almost passed out when I opened the exemplar documents and found that they comprised of between 60-80 pages of evaluative content.  Thankfully, I worked with an excellent group of four women to accomplish the final document for this course – a mock evaluation of Google Docs as a classroom tool.  Our professor was excellent to emphasize that we evaluate one aspect and one aspect only of our selected program evaluation as any data would need to be triangulated, and if we were to stray from the targeted evaluation, we would be tripling our workload each time we strayed.  Initially, I was disgruntled by the idea of narrowing the focus to such a  thin area, but I experienced an “a-ha” moment when I realized that I speak the same speech to my grade seven students when we do their spreadsheet, and I am trying to save them the stress and anxiety that can result from taking a reasonable assignment and inflating it inadvertently.

Our first learning task was a “Peecha Kucha” multimedia presentation (20 slides, 20 seconds each) on one of the major approaches to evaluation: the program-oriented approach, the decision-oriented approach, the expertise-oriented approach, the participant-oriented approach and the consumer-oriented approach.  My partner, Joelle and I used Go Animate to create our presentation on the consumer-oriented approach to evaluation.

Our major learning task was the evaluation of Google Docs, which I completed with Joelle, Kelly and Sandy. This undertaking involved repeated video-conferences between the four of us.  We used Zoom to conduct our video conferences, and I have to comment that I was very impressed with the ease of use of this utility to facilitate our collaboration. It is important that I emphasize that this evaluation did not use legitimate data.  Our data was forged for the purposes of having data with which to work. It was a mock evaluation in order that we learn the skills and research behind the evaluative process.  Our final product for this course was Program Evaluation: Effect of Google Docs on Assignment Completion.