Online course teaches how to judge a project's effectiveness

Want to learn how to assess a program or project's effectiveness? 

Over the past two decades, the terms program “performance and accountability” and “program evaluation” have become the focus of vigorous debate within the social, health and education services. Calls for increased scrutiny of public funding have increased the competition for scarce resources and federal, state and local emphasis on measurement of program and policy effectiveness have driven the focus on measurable outcomes. At the same time, increased focus on the quality of service delivery and on developing “learning organizations” has led to the building of systems of ongoing feedback and quality improvement efforts.

The skills-based program evaluation course offered by the University of Indianapolis Center for Aging & Community is designed to provide students an introductory overview of the tools and techniques to measure the activities, characteristics, effectiveness and efficiency of programs targeted to specific populations. 

You will learn how to provide feedback to decision-makers and other stakeholders, to determine whether a given program is achieving desired outcomes, and explore how to assess "value" based on evaluation results. In this course, the emphasis will be on what is needed to develop a successful evaluation, how to manage the “context” of the evaluation to ensure a positive evaluation experience for the evaluator(s) and the program evaluated, and how to foster the use of evaluation findings through design, conduct and reporting.

By the end of the course, you will have developed an evaluation plan, learned the vocabulary of evaluation, and have the tools necessary to successfully engage in evaluation practice.

Program Evaluation (GERO 571) is taught completely online by Associate Professor Sharon Baggett, PhD. Course registration is open until August 13, 2012. For more information on this course and all of CAC's online aging studies courses, click here.