Further Resources and Links for those who attended the Bridge M&E Colloquium on 12 August 2014

Today, I got the opportunity to present to the Bridge M&E Colloquium on the work I'm doing with the CSIR Meraka Institute on the ICT4RED project. My first presentation gave some background about the ICT4RED project. 




I referred to the availability of the Teacher Professional Development course under a creative commons licence here, - This resource also includes a full description of the micro-accreditation system or Badging system. 

What seemed to get the participants in the meeting really excited is the 12 Component model of the project - which seems to suggest that one has to pay attention to much more than just technology when you implement a project of this nature. My colleagues published a paper on this topic here.

Participants also resonated with the "Earn as you Learn" model that the project follows - If teachers demonstrate that they comply with certain assessment criteria, they earn technology and peripherals for themselves and for their schools. A paper on the gamification philosophy that underlies the course, is available here.  The Learn to Earn model was documented in a learning brief here.


And then I was able to speak a little more about the evaluation design of the project. The paper that underlies this work is available here, and the presentation is accessible below:



I think what sets our project evaluation apart from many others being conducted in South Africa, is that it truly uses "Developmental Evaluation" as the evaluation approach. For more information about this (and for a very provocative evaluation read in general), make sure you get your hands on Michael Patton's book. A short description of the approach and a list of other resources can also be found here.

People really liked the idea of using Learning Briefs to document learning for / from team members, and to share with a wider community. This is an idea inspired by the DG Murray Trust. I blogged about the process and template we used before. An example of the learning brief that the M&E team developed for the previous round, is available here. More learning briefs are available on the ICT4RED blog.

I also explained that we use the Impact Story Tool for capturing and verifying an array of anticipated and unanticipated impacts. I've explained the use and analysis of the tool in more detail in another blog post. There was immediate interest in this simple little tool.

A neat trick that also got some people excited, is how we use Survey Monkey. To make sure that our data is available quickly to all potential users on the team, we capture our data (even data collected on paper) in Survey Monkey, and then share the results with our project partners via the sharing interface on Surveymonkey - even before we've really been able to analyse the data. The Survey Monkey site, explains this in a little more detail with examples.

The idea of using non-traditional electronic means to help with data collection also got some participants excited. I explained that we have a Whatsapp group for facilitators, and we monitor this, together with our more traditional post-training feedback forms, to ascertain if there are problems that need solving. In an upcoming blog post, I'll share a little bit about exactly how we used the WhatsApp data, and what we were able to learn from it.