Encouraging participation and collaboration
Most evaluation activities do not directly benefit the students who participate in an evaluation but may benefit future cohorts of students. There is also already a high demand on them to participate in quality monitoring by completing questionnaires for modules, programmes, National Student Survey etc. It can therefore be difficult to engage them in the process. If they feel 'over-evaluated' this may have an adverse effect on what you are trying to achieve with the curriculum development, or it may bias the evaluation.
Students are most likely to return of questionnaires if these are distributed and collected in class, however this may not always be practical. Electronic questionnaires provide an alternative but note that it will be difficult to encourage students to complete these unless the process maintains their anonymity. MOLE surveys provide this facility but are unlikely to be completed by students unless they are already using MOLE regularly.
Similarly attendance of focus groups is best motivated through scheduling them in time-tabled class or immediately afterwards. The latter, however, does not always guarantee attendance and relying on volunteers can influence the quality of the data.
Closing the feedback loop with participants is recommended to be the most effective way of encouraging participation. This means that participants are informed of the findings and what action has been taken as a consequence of their feedback.
If students participate in an approach that takes up a lot of their time, such as a focus group or interview, they may need additional incentives to participate. Providing refreshments is one option. Making cash payments may raise questions about the reliability of an evaluation where the outcome turns out to be extremely positive. Offering cash or other prizes to a subset of the group participating through a random prize draw may overcome this problem.
In participatory or collaborative evaluation approaches participants in the L&T context are not just sources of data for the evaluation but also participate or collaborate in the evaluation process itself. They may have some influence on the questions that will be addressed by the inquiry, the approach that will be taken, how findings are interpreted and reported, and the decisions that are made as a result of the evaluation.