I am Susan Kistler, the American Evaluation Association’s Executive Director and aea365’s regular Saturday contributor.
Guess what just moved into the #1 spot for the most read aea365 article of all time? The April 6, 2013 post announcing the collaboration with BetterEvaluation to produce a series of publicly available Coffee Break Webinars! We’re well under way with the webinar series focusing on the RainbowFramework for planning, managing, and implementing an evaluation, and I want to share an update:
Hot Tip – Sign Up to Attend the Remaining Offerings Live: There are still six more webinars to go in the series, to be offered every Tuesday and Thursday through until the end of May. If you attend live, you have an opportunity to raise questions at the end, and to hear directly from the presenters. Register for the remaining free webinars here – note that you must register for each one separately.
Hot Tip – Subscribe to AEA’s YouTube Channel and Check Out the First Webinar in the Series: The recording of the first webinar in the series is already available online. Go to http://www.youtube.com/user/AmEvalAssn and click the Subscribe button just below the header to receive notices as each subsequent recording is posted.
Hot Tip – We’re having each of the videos in the series professional transcribed: The transcription is useful in at least four ways: (1) it enables reading the video content for those who may have hearing limitations, (2) it allows viewers to read along in case the video’s audio is not perfect or the viewer is more comfortable with written rather than spoken English, (3) it allows for easily extracting references and written quotes from the video, and (4) it serves as the basis for improved translation to other languages.
Cool Trick – Automated Translation Is Available and Human Translations Are Coming: You can select “Translate Captions” (see the screenshot below) and Google will create a machine translation of the captions and transcript. Working from a professional transcription improves the quality of the machine translation, but the quality is still quite variable. I am excited to announce that we are working with a team of volunteers to translate this video series into multiple languages.
Lessons Learned (Coming Soon): I’ll share a note once the human translations are available. And, in a future post I will also cover (a) how to contract for transcriptions, (b) how to work with colleagues to create video translations (it’s easier than you think), and (c) how to upload/incorporate transcriptions and translations into your videos since I know that increasingly we’re seeing evaluators sharing video on YouTube.
Hot Tip – Make the Most of YouTube:
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.
Thank you to AEA for supporting this webinar series and for working to make it more widely accessible.
We’re following up each webinar with a post in our series ’52 weeks of BetterEvaluation’ and will feature one a week for the next 8 weeks. In these posts we discuss key issues and answer some of the questions asked in the webinar (we will progressively answer the others through FAQ on the site)
You can read the first one, by Irene Guijt, on using the rainbow framework to plan, conduct and manage an evaluation at http://betterevaluation.org/blog/using_the_rainbow_framework and you can find the others as they become available at http://betterevaluation.org/52_weeks_2013