Open AccessScope Creep and Purposeful Pivots in Developmental Evaluation
Author(s) -
Suparna Roy,
Michelle Searle
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
canadian journal of program evaluation/the canadian journal of program evaluation
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.341
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1496-7308
pISSN - 0834-1516
DOI - 10.3138/cjpe.56898
Subject(s) - scope (computer science) , stakeholder , set (abstract data type) , session (web analytics) , psychology , knowledge management , engineering ethics , plenary session , process management , pedagogy , public relations , business , political science , computer science , engineering , world wide web , library science , programming language
This practice note illustrates a situation where, as program evaluators, we crept beyond the provisional boundaries set by our Developmental Evaluation (DE) goals to facilitate learning. Our DE was initially focused on one program which was being designed for online delivery in higher education. During the DE of this program, questions and themes arose which had larger organizational applicability; we were asked to help design a strategic learning session that addressed a large group of stakeholders within which existed the tiny subset of stakeholders engaged in the original DE. This practice note describes how we negotiated the emergent purposes of the DE with the need for intentional pivots within the strategic learning session to serve our intended subset of stakeholders with their project as well as stimulate evaluative thinking within the larger stakeholder group.