Lars Balzer on The Evaluation Portal Event Calendar

My name is Lars Balzer, I am head of the Evaluation Unit at the Swiss Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (SFIVET) and also responsible for the Evaluation Portal.

Congresses, conferences, workshops, lectures, and continuing education programs are excellent opportunities to learn new things about evaluation, discuss interesting topics and exchange ideas with colleagues.

Rad Resource: The Evaluation Portal Event Calendar is an international calendar for evaluation-related events that can help you find such settings. Currently you can find an evaluation-related event there on average about every 3rd day in 2014.

Hot Tip: To find an event, simply browse through the calendar and filter events by selecting one or more subcategories from the main categories: “continent”, “country”, “language” and “type of event” so that only events which fit your criteria are shown.

We also have “Featured”, “Most Popular” and “Newest” so that you can find upcoming events, events which have received the most clicks from site visitors, or events newly added to the calendar. Of course you can also do a specific search for a particular event.

Cool Trick: You can subscribe to a newsletter which sends you information about events in the categories you have chosen about once a month. There are also several RSS-feeds available. Various web 2.0 options can be used to share information, and you can also download events to your personal calendar.

Get Involved: Are you responsible for an evaluation-related event? Every event related to evaluation can be registered, so if you know about one not already included, feel free to submit it. Information about your event will be spread to the global evaluation community. It’s a great way to get people to learn about your event.

If you run events on a regular basis, I can also build a separate organizer page and all your events will then be linked with this page.

All this is a free of charge, private and independent service – just check it out.

Rad Resource: The Event Calendar is just one section of the Evaluation Portal. There is also the Link Collection with more than 550 individually described and approved links to evaluation books, journals, downloadable guides and handbooks, free and commercial tools, businesses, and much more.

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.