ROER4D Project Activity Toolkit - Evaluation

The Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project was a four-year (2013–2017), large-scale networked project which set out to contribute a Global South research perspective on how open educational resources can help to improve access, enhance quality and reduce the cost of education in the Global South. The project engaged a total of 103 researchers in 18 sub-projects across 21 countries from South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, coordinated by Network Hub teams at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Wawasan Open University.

This chapter forms part of a project activity toolkit, which is comprised of five documents outlining activities associated with each of the ROER4D UCT Network Hub pillars of project management activity: networking, evaluation, communications, research capacity building, and curation and dissemination. It is hoped that these chapters will be of practical use to other projects attempting to integrate any of these functions in their operational strategy.

The focus of this chapter is on the evaluation activity which took place within the ROER4D project. Using a Utilization-Focused Evaluation (UFE) framework as a scaffold, it outlines and reflects on what evaluation activity was undertaken in the ROER4D project against the 12-step UFE process, why this was done and what was learned from the process. It also offers recommendations for other Global South, large-scale networked projects that may wish to implement an internal, use-focused evaluation process.