My name is Stephanie Evergreen and I am the eLearning Initiatives Director at the American Evaluation Association and the stand-in for Susan Kistler today. I am the host of our Coffee Break Demonstrations, 20-minute webinars designed to teach about a tool or resource of use to evaluators.
Last month our Coffee Break lineup featured a series of webinars on international monitoring and evaluation. It was cosponsored by Catholic Relief Services, American Red Cross, USAID, and AEA’s International and Cross-Cultural Topical Interest Group. Each week, Scott Chaplowe, Guy Sharrock, Susan Hahn, or Alice Willard walked the audience through a set of tools to help evaluators and evaluation managers successfully plan their work.
But our audience was a little different this time around. While our usual Coffee Break webinars are only accessible to AEA members, for this series we opened registration to the general public. And some cool things happened:
- our average audience size more than doubled (no small feat in vacation season),
- we consistently attracted viewers from more than 15 countries, and
- our international attendance was 4 times higher than normal.
Rad Resource: The recordings of each webinar, though normally also a benefit of AEA membership, are available for anyone to view. The ICC TIG has graciously posted all 4 of them in one location for your convenience.
Rad Resource: The webinars were based on a complete set of modules originally developed by Catholic Relief Services and American Red Cross with funding from USAID. Even if your field of focus is not international monitoring and evaluation, I was impressed by the versatility of the materials and how easy it would be to adapt module content to a variety of evaluation contexts.
Hot Tip: Some of these awesome presenters will be discussing international monitoring and evaluation at greater length at the conference. Get in on the conversation with Guy Sharrock and Alice Willard at their panel session or stop in to the multipaper session where Scott Chaplowe is discussant.
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.