Introduction - case study

30 minute writing exercise:

In the higher education sector, learning and teaching research projects constitute one avenue of funding. These projects are either internally or externally funded by various private and governmental bodies (reference). With the move towards greater accountability of public funding and the drive to increase quality education, the necessity to incorporate evaluation measures is growing. Not only to include evaluation but to build evaluation into the project life-cycle both systematically and rigorously. There is a wide body of literature on the evaluation of learning and teaching and the utilization of evaluation results to improve the student experience (references here).
A recent review of the learning and teaching project evaluation literature indicated that there is little evidence of the scholarship....
But there is little to no empirical research on the evaluation of learning and teaching projects in the higher education sector and how the benefits can be realised in practice. One recent research study conducted by the authors has begun to invesigate the factors that inhibit the use of evalaution practices in the sector nad found that project leaders perceptions are an influencing factor. However that paper called for further study into this area, more specifically to observe a learning and teaching project to examine how the perceptions play out over time and investigate what can be done in practice to support the effective use of evaluation for wider scale benefit to the organisation / institution and ultimately the student experience.
This study aims to investigate the evaluative measures used during three internally funded learning and teaching projects, and explore how the project leaders' perceptions of evaluation affected their praxis. Furthermore, this study will consider what can be done to overcome barriers to successful evaluation implementation and therefore enhance this praxis.