Evaluating without numbers: Exploration of a story based evaluation method

Australia/Sydney 11.00am | Thurs 10th November
America/New York 7.00pm | Wed 9th November
Europe/London 12.00am | Thurs 10th November

Presenter: Ann Wilson– Senior Academic Developer
Navitas Learning and Teaching Services

Evaluation is a key part of the improvement cycle and the reporting requirements of any course or program. It answers the questions: how did we do, and how might we make it better?

Quantitative evaluation methods can be relatively straightforward, meeting the need for numbers to share a broad view of what’s happening. But sometimes numbers alone struggle to tell the whole story of the impact and the experiences of individuals and groups.

In this presentation, Ann Wilson will share her experience of a narrative- or story-based evaluation method, which was recently published in the journal Studies in Educational Evaluation.

Ann will talk specifically about network evaluation and about how story-building approaches to evaluation blend individual and collective knowledge to create a ‘compelling picture of how communities and networks create value’. It’s the interplay of these individual and collective stories that that reveal what could otherwise have been hidden.