Abstract:

It is common to evaluate and asses learners achievements in knowledge and other skills and competences. This evaluation is commonly done based on the level of activeness. On the other hand, it is common also to evaluate institutions in terms of the impact and success of their learners (qualifications, employment rate, cost, etc).

Evaluation in institutions is an important issue as it is a formal source of information to increase the quality and impact of the institution based on their aims and the effectiveness of the impact on the target. An evaluation procedure allows management to know the general status of the institution and take any corrective action to improve it. It can be used also for internal and external accreditation.

When the students employment rate, students marks, or qualifications is not important, then evaluate the success of the school becomes difficult. This is the case of senior education (citizens over 65 or retired), their motivation to learn is mainly personal, they are not evaluated by marks. On the other hand, the evaluations of the institutions is more difficult, because teachers, pedagogies, courses and activities do not have specific aims (as in an university degree or master), but more social, human and personal. The main aims for senior education is to increase seniors’ well-being, social skills, be active, participative and healthy. All those needs could be summarised in one general aim: to increase QoL

The European project QEduSen (Evaluation toolkit on seniors education to improve their quality of life) produced a toolkit that can be used to assess the institution when offering educational activities to senior learners.

Firstly, this paper shows how the evaluation toolkit was produced. Currently it has 38 indicators. Each of them includes the justification, evidences, and recommendations in any of 7 educational dimensions (premises, organisation, management, pedagogies, models, staff, content and activities). The design of the indicators were done based on QoL dimensions and how those indicators could be useful for evaluation and improvement. This papers show how this was achieved and tested.

The evaluation toolkit can be used in an ordinary way: to obtain a mark about the effectiveness and efficacy of the educational activity, but after testing procedure (as part of the quality increase project work package), it showed a lot more of applications, those are:
- to find an institution’s weaknesses and potentialities and raise its quality
- for accreditation by external evaluators and for advice and recommendations about how to improve the quality of your institution
- to uncover/discover the most suitable educational characteristics that can impact seniors’ quality of life and its relation
- to recognize some important issues of one educational institution for: study visit, exchange of best practises, experiences, classification of the characteristics, etc.
- Indicators provide clear characteristics with recommendations that can be transferred and applied, far from general and broad concepts

Therefore, an evaluation toolkit, when correctly designed, is a very powerful took, useful not only to increase the quality of educational institutions, but as in the case of the QEduSen project for other processes related to validating, guidance, learning, management, research and policy-making.

Keywords:

Evaluation, assessment, quality.