Abstract:

In every EU project there is a requirement for evaluation. The aim of the evaluation is to improve the quality of the project, regarding the process and the outcomes. In this paper we have looked at three EU projects, the Leonardo projects iQTool – Innovative eLearning Tool for Quality Training Material in VET and Understand IT, and the Erasmus Multilateral project dCCDFLITE – Distributed Concurrent Design Framework for IT-Entrepreneurship, and the way the evaluation was designed, implemented and accomplished. One project was managed from Hungary, one from Norway and one from Sweden. The project teams comprised people mostly from Higher Educational Institutions, but also from VET institutions and industry. We have looked at the usefulness of these evaluations regarding process improvement. Q1: To what extent did they reveal significant factors? Q2: Were the findings discussed and corrected during the implementation of the projects? Q3: Did the project members answer each evaluation question as accurately as possible or did they give better scores than they really wanted to and, if so, why? Q4: Did the evaluation lead to improved project quality? Our conclusions build on analyses of primary evaluation data, official evaluation reports and a post survey with project members. We have also studied recent papers on project evaluations. An important conclusion is that the evaluations were useful to the extent that they were used actively during the project work. Another observation was that people gave better evaluations, or used the upper part of the scale to demonstrate a positive attitude to the project and the team and to avoid possible unwanted external attention. A final observation was that some serious matters were discussed outside the official evaluations. The paper ends with some recommendations regarding how to achieve more effective evaluations.

Keywords:

Evaluation, International Project work, CSCW, online learning.