Abstract:

In the field of adult education the use of ICT has a big potential in widening access and improving the quality of provision. New professional skills are required for working in new learning environments, to include evaluation processes in personal learning paths.

This is part of issues considered in the AAA-StepUp2-ICT project, an Adult Education Erasmus+ project, running from October 2017 to September 2019, focused on building the ICT capacity of adult educators in their specific occupational context.

To this purpose, the adult training process has been divided into 6 areas on the basis of recognized instructional models (e.g. ADDIE, Training Material Development Guide by Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency): training coordination, need assessment, training content design, training content development, training delivery and training evaluation.

This paper focuses on the use of ICT in the area of training evaluation considered from two different aspects: assessing student learning and evaluating the quality of the training program.

Assessing student learning means verifying if students have reached the expected learning goals. One challenge of effective assessment is to ensure that there is a close alignment between the learning objectives and the assessment activities used to evaluate the related achievements. Therefore it is important to be able to monitor students’ learning progress during the training course (formative assessment) and not only at the end (summative assessment). In-course assessment techniques systematize the process of getting useful and timely feedback on student learning and allow trainers to adjust their teaching to help students learn.

Evaluating the quality of the training provides information about the usefulness, appropriateness and effectiveness of the training program. It is useful for the adult educators to collect feedback, suggestions for changes and improvements in the training methodology and content from the training participants. There are different approaches to training evaluation. A widely used approach is the traditional Kirkpatrick’s model (1976) or its more recent extensions.

The usage of ICT in this area provides an important added-value for trainers, who could assess student learning and evaluate the quality of the training in a more efficient, effective, accurate, engaging and innovative way.

Several training activities have been published as Open Educational Resources (OERs) together with a description of relevant ICT tools used within each activity (http://www.stepup2ict.eu/en_GB/project/activities/ ).

Adult educators are presented with a list of activities, describing steps to follow, duration, added-value, difficulty level, equipment and the required ICT tool(/s). This approach is very practical and guides the adult educators through the accomplishment of the activity by exploiting ICT and its andragogical value in the learning process.

Activity examples in the evaluation domain include “Create a survey for training evaluation”, “Deliver a quiz for formative assessment”, “Create a competition in the classroom”. The related tools are Socrative, Google Forms and Kahoot!

Evaluation and testing events of the methodology and material carried out since Spring 2019 demonstrate that the adopted approach is adequate, useful and engaging for adult educators in their working context.

Keywords:

Adult education, training evaluation, ICT.