Evaluating learning and teaching technologies in further education

Abstract

With the current emphasis on quality assessment and the role of evaluation in quality assessment, it is likely that teachers in post-compulsory education will increasingly be expected to evaluate their teaching, especially when making changes to their teaching methods. In Further Education (FE), there have been a number of developments to foster the use of Information and Learning Technologies (ILT), following the publication of the Higginson Report in 1996. However, there is some evidence that the adoption of ILT has been patchy. This paper reports on a project funded by the Further Education Development Agency to develop evaluation tools for use by FE colleges to evaluate their use of ILT. One of the main challenges for the project team was to produce a tool that could be used by time-pressed practitioners with little or no experience of evaluation for use with very diverse projects and students. The paper discusses this challenge, the approach to developing the tool that was adopted, the findings from the project and the implications of these findings.