Ongoing and mid-term project evaluation – why and how?
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First published in Polish by Beata Ciężka
Motto: "If you put ongoing evaluation to work, the project goes like clockwork"
(Source: The Non-existent Great Book of Fictional Sayings about Evaluation)
What is the ongoing and mid-term evaluation?
The evaluation should be carried out during the project's entire life cycle. It can take the form of an ongoing evaluation. This covers the project activities that are currently being implemented. It can be carried out as a mid-term evaluation if it provides information on a completed stage of project implementation, e.g. selection of participants from the target group of adult learners, implementation of the first round of learning mobilities, development of educational materials, preparation of publications, current dissemination of information about the project and its outcomes.
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Why should you carry out the ongoing and mid-term evaluation of Erasmus+ Adult Education projects?
The main purpose of ongoing evaluation is to ensure efficient project implementation. It provides information that can be used here and now to react quickly enough when a problem is identified. It helps to prevent problems from escalating and to look for solutions before a problem causes the project schedule to be disrupted or a planned activity not to be carried out.
Ongoing evaluation helps to ensure that the activities carried out are of a sufficiently high quality and that the needs of the recipients of these activities are not lost sight of. For example, recipients of project activities may begin to withdraw from the activities or complain about their poor quality. Evaluation can investigate the reasons for their decision or complaint, the problems and barriers they encounter, and suggest what the promoters should do to prevent this from happening.
The mid-term evaluation examines the progress made (material and financial) and summarises the results achieved at a given project stage. It checks whether the project's progress aligns with the planned schedule and expenditure. It is worth doing to gather information on the effectiveness and quality of the completed project phase. On the one hand, such an evaluation summarises what has been achieved. It allows you to learn about the impact of the project and its first results, which are already noticeable at a certain stage of implementation. On the other hand, it assesses the capital (achievements, but also possible problems) with which you enter the project's next phase.
Ongoing and mid-term evaluation can assess the validity of the organisational assumptions (e.g. division of tasks between partners and within the beneficiary organisation) and content-related ones (e.g. profile of participants from the target groups of adult learners, scope of the educational content of a study visit, content of the materials developed) that were made at the project preparation stage. A certain time usually elapses between project planning and implementation, and new circumstances may make it difficult to fulfil the assumptions made. Changing them early on makes it possible to implement a project efficiently and effectively if these assumptions are not feasible. A pandemic was an unforeseen circumstance that had a major impact on project implementation. Early evaluation to support the search for new solutions has saved many a project.
How to carry out the ongoing and mid-term evaluation of Erasmus+ Adult Education projects?
For ongoing and mid-term evaluation, you can analyse documentation, including the training programmes of completed mobility activities, the products of the project developed so far, the minutes and notes of meetings, the working materials developed, and even the results of workshops recorded on flipcharts or videos documenting the progress of work. Any tangible result can be treated as documentation and provide valuable material for analysis.
Surveys can also be carried out, e.g. with beneficiaries of project activities, but due to the nature of this evaluation, these surveys should not be too extensive. The value here is in the speed with which information can be collected and analysed. Here, short online surveys (using commonly available survey collection and analysis applications) will work best).
Interviews, especially moderated focus group interviews, e.g. among project partners, project participants or in mixed groups, are an indispensable source of information in the ongoing and mid-term evaluation. Such interviews are useful not only for collecting data and opinions but also for identifying solutions to problems in project implementation or in achieving planned results.
It is particularly important in the adult education sector to ask for feedback from adult learners after the initial project activities. Especially in the case of mobilities, it is worth asking what could be improved before the next group travels. Gathering information in this way will help improve participants' subsequent mobilities and avoid mistakes or problems during the first mobility activities).
How can you use the ongoing and mid-term evaluation results of Erasmus+ Adult Education projects?
The main purpose of ongoing and interim evaluation is to document project progress and provide an 'early warning system' for effective project management and quality assurance of activities and outputs. Information about possible problems in the implementation of the project so far can be used for their solution or avoidance in subsequent project phases.
The results of the evaluation can be described in the progress report/interim report in the following sections of the report:
Project Management and Implementation - to describe the achievements at a given stage about the objectives set. The results of the mid-term evaluation can be used here.
Description of project monitoring - to indicate who carries out the monitoring activities. Here, it is possible to list the activities carried out as part of the ongoing and mid-term evaluation and to indicate whether they are carried out by persons who are part of the project team (in this case, it is called internal evaluation or self-evaluation) or by a person or persons specifically hired for this task who are not part of the project team (in this case it is called external evaluation).
Description of the partners' tasks and possible explanation of whether the distribution of tasks in the project has changed to the assumptions made in the application. The results of the ongoing evaluation may justify such changes.
Description of any difficulties encountered in managing the project and any measures the partners took to overcome them. The results of the ongoing evaluation can be used to inform about difficulties and corrective measures taken.
Description of the project's impact on staff, target group members, participating organisations and other stakeholders. The project's influence can be examined in an ongoing or mid-term evaluation, and the results of this evaluation can be used as a basis for presenting information on project impact at a particular stage of implementation.
Description of how the results of the ongoing/mid-term evaluation have affected the subsequent implementation of the project and how project areas/elements/activities have been improved.
Beata Ciężka – evaluator, author and implementer of training courses in evaluation. She has extensive experience conducting research and evaluation projects for the European Commission and the Adult Education sector of the Erasmus+ programme. She specialises in educational programmes and projects. Co-founder of the Polish Evaluation Society. From 2017 to 2020 an EPALE Ambassador.
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