Question 11 - challenges to conducting the evaluation

I'm now looking at the question 'were there any challenges to conducting the evaluation?'

An emerging theme that is coming through is that there is a lot of interference from contextual events. Running a project is something that is done at the same time as teaching, research, marking. Then there is the institutional requirements that occur simultaneously - the playing out of major projects and change procedures that also impact on the time available and possibly the outcomes. Now these all impact on how the project is run and not necessarily to the evaluation but it appears as a consequence, evaluation gets sidelined or is often not as rigorous as perhaps they initially hoped.

Some other themes that emerged:

• Time
•  Money
• Administration/resources
• Confusion in answering, talking about the challenges of conducting the research and not the evaluation.

When asked what could be done to overcome some of these issues, the following themes emerged:

• More money
• More time
• Better planning 
• More help with evaluation
• Developmental Evaluation

This last dot point arose because a few people were talking about using evaluation for checks and measures along the way, to refocus. And also to have evaluation incorporated into the approach so it becomes part of what you do and not something extra you have to make time for.