Determine how you will evaluate the effectiveness of your module

Evaluation is a vital element of design, giving information as to how well the intended learning outcomes have been achieved, how effective module design is in scaffolding student achievement towards these outcomes, and in understanding individual and cohort experiences.

Module Evaluation Questionnaires and assessment results provide some insight, but other evaluation techniques (eg mid-module evaluation; in-class polling) can help in triangulation and highlighting issues at an early stage. 

Evaluation is most successful when it is built into the planning process of module design.

Of course, you may need or wish to alter your evaluation methods during the progress of teaching (and it is perfectly possible to do so), but ideally points and purposes of evaluation will be planned in advance.

A potential cycle of evaluation may, then, look something like the following (Walker, R. (2020). Webinar: Evaluating online learning. York: University of York, 23 July 2020):

• Download an accessible pdf of this image: Cycle of evaluation (PDF , 23kb)

You can explore the stages of this cycle using the pages that follow:

• Designing in evaluation
• Defining your approach
• Identifying data collection methods and developing a plan
• Making sense of your evaluation data and taking action