What are the best ways to overcome barriers in educational technology evaluation?

1 Align evaluation with goals

Before you start an evaluation, you need to clarify the purpose, scope, and objectives of your educational technology project. What are you trying to achieve, and how will you measure it? How does it align with your organizational or curricular goals? By defining and communicating your evaluation goals, you can focus your efforts, avoid unnecessary data collection, and ensure that your evaluation questions and methods are relevant and meaningful.

2 Involve stakeholders

Stakeholders are the people who have an interest or influence in your educational technology project, such as learners, teachers, administrators, funders, or policymakers. They can provide valuable input, feedback, and support for your evaluation. By involving them from the beginning, you can identify their needs, expectations, and perspectives, and ensure that your evaluation addresses them. You can also foster a culture of evaluation, where stakeholders are engaged, informed, and committed to using evaluation results for improvement and decision-making.

3 Use mixed methods

Evaluation methods are the tools and techniques that you use to collect and analyze data, such as surveys, interviews, observations, tests, or analytics. Depending on your evaluation goals and questions, you may need to use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, or mixed methods, to capture the complexity and richness of your educational technology project. Mixed methods can help you triangulate data from different sources, validate and explain your findings, and provide a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of your project.

4 Adapt to context

Evaluation is not a one-size-fits-all process. It depends on the context and characteristics of your educational technology project, such as the type, scale, duration, and stage of development. You need to adapt your evaluation design and implementation to fit your specific situation, and be flexible and responsive to changes and challenges that may arise. For example, you may need to modify your evaluation questions, methods, or timeline based on the feedback from stakeholders, the availability of data, or the technical issues that you encounter.

5 Share and learn

Evaluation is not only about collecting and analyzing data, but also about sharing and learning from the results. You need to communicate your evaluation findings and recommendations to your stakeholders and other audiences, using appropriate formats, channels, and language. You also need to reflect on your evaluation process and outcomes, and identify the lessons learned, the best practices, and the areas for improvement. By sharing and learning from your evaluation, you can enhance your knowledge, skills, and confidence as an evaluator, and contribute to the advancement of educational technology.