When evaluating our courses we continuously ask our participants whether the course was engaging and interesting.
One simple way to evaluate it is to monitor what happens in the classroom when the lunch / coffee breaks are due.
The example below shows the CM-SAF workshop ongoing in Helsinki 7-11 October 2013. The local organiser Aku R. (top photo on left) is kindly reminding the participants not to forget the coffee break.
But the results are modest (bottom photo).
CM-SAF Climate workshop is an example of a workshop with few presentations but instead a lot of individual work and continuously available instructors to help when problems occur. This type of working is quite different from many workshops, where the programme is more presentation based.
One simple way to evaluate it is to monitor what happens in the classroom when the lunch / coffee breaks are due.
The example below shows the CM-SAF workshop ongoing in Helsinki 7-11 October 2013. The local organiser Aku R. (top photo on left) is kindly reminding the participants not to forget the coffee break.
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| Coffee break reminder at CM-SAF Workshop in Helsinki 8 October 2013. At this point coffee break had officially started already 20 minutes ago. |
But the results are modest (bottom photo).
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| The effect of reminder is modest on participants.Working on data is more interesting. |
This is a great statement about the power of active learning approaches (when the activities are relevant to the learners). Thanks for sharing the photos and details. Should we be adding, "Was the course engaging?" to our evaluations? I think so, but we might need to define "engagement" also just to be clear. I have used a definition like this:
ReplyDelete• Your curiosity about the content grew as you learned more.
• You anticipated the answers to questions and solutions to problems posed.
• In general, you found yourself thinking a lot about the material and caring whether you fully understood it. For example, you may have reviewed content or asked questions if you were unsure you fully understood it the first time.
• You made significant effort to complete exercises and understand the feedback provided.
• You could easily imagine yourself using what you were learning and actively thought about how you might use it.
Good point about the engagement and evaluation. Would you include it into an evaluation form or rather discuss in a classroom?
ReplyDeleteWe used the word ‘engage’ in the Workshop Evaluation Form when referring to the quality of instructors, but we didn't explain really what we mean by it. Maybe we should have? Maybe it would be better to break down this question and add more details? However I am afraid we will make that form longer every time we reflect on it...
Note that in the ‘standard form’ we are still working on (see Mark's post), there will be a question about the quality of each session. Because there were not clearly separated sessions in this workshop, we decided to remove it.
Pat, your definition of engagement beautifully captures my own experience this past week. I came into the course with not much anticipations: I had thought my role would be just watching the workshop happen and let the facilitators do their job with participants. But I soon found out the material is so interesting and the week so long time, that I could not help starting to work on a little research myself. So yes:
ReplyDelete- my curiousity about the content grew as I learned more.
- the facilitators were there to help me on critical moments.
- I managed to visualise the first pieces of data already in a few minutes after beginning, this was highly motivating to keep on going.
- And because of all these rewards along the way I made in the end a significant effort to complete the project and finished it 2 AM the last night.
According to the feedback discussion in the end of the workshop many other participants shared somewhat similar experiences.