In February 2022, STEER began to work on an evaluation of the Postgraduate Certificate (PGCert) and Master’s (MA) Student Engagement in Higher Education at the University of Winchester. The programme team commissioned an evaluation to find out what impact the PGCert / MA has had on the practitioners studying on the course and within their organisations of employment, and to explore how the design and processes of the course, including its blended delivery, have contributed to the outcomes being achieved. This blog post presents: 1) the experiences of the practitioners on the course who co-designed and participated in the evaluation; 2) the reflections of the programme team about what they learnt from the project; 3) the perspectives of the evaluation team from STEER.
Sheffield Hallam has committed to using and supporting the use of a Theory of Change to design interventions and underpin robust evaluation planning. The aim of the blog is to highlight the utility of a Theory of Change in a range of contexts and to outline some of the work that has been developed and completed at Hallam. The examples included in this blog showcase the use of a Theory of Change at different stages in the evaluation process. Some are used during intervention design and some after a period of implementation, while many of the examples are complex and the Theory of Change is being drafted for multi-activity programmes.