Evaluating digital inclusion projects in practice
| Dates: | 15 April 2015 |
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| Times: | 11:00 - 12:30 |
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| What is it: | Workshop |
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| Organiser: | methods@manchester |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Current University students |
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This workshop will be led by Dr Alice Mathers and James Richardson, from Tinder Foundation’s Research & Innovation team. Our opening presentation will describe digital exclusion and its close relationship with other forms of social exclusion, explain the importance of digital inclusion for individuals, communities and government, and give an overview of the current digital inclusion policy and practice landscape.
We will go on to discuss the importance of robust evaluation in digital inclusion practice, and its methodological implications. Examples of current major projects will demonstrate the close relationship between research methodology and effective practice, where inclusion programmes and research frameworks that deal with wider social exclusion are more likely to be effective and insightful. Working in small groups, students will then be given real-life project briefs and asked to design evaluation approaches to capture relevant scales of project impact. In considering evaluation design for their specific brief each group should consider:
The importance of talking to expert ground-level digital and social inclusion practitioners
How to assess the connection between digital exclusion and other forms of social exclusion
What skills and outcomes need to be measured
How to strike the right balance between quantitative and qualitative study
To what extent their evaluation framework could or should allow comparison between different digital inclusion projects
How to deal with the budgetary constraints that are usual faced by delivery organisations, for whom funding is usually attached to significant numeric targets with a minimal allocation for formal evaluation
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
4.212
University Place
Manchester
