Evaluation of a College Co-Curricular Program
Project Description: An evaluation plan was created for the C2C Advantage (College-to-Career) program – an actual co-curricular program currently in pilot testing at LeMoyne College, Syracuse, NY. It was designed to determine qualitatively whether C2C Advantage’s instructional content, strategies, and assessment values were in alignment with stated objectives and learning outcomes, and whether the Career Services staff and other stakeholders felt the program was useful.
This project was selected because of my ongoing professional relationship with Mark Schappert, a Career Counselor at LeMoyne College, for whom I designed the front-end appearance of the C2C Advantage system itself, as well as the promotional and marketing website.
Reflection: Even simple evaluation studies can be enormously complicated because of contextual factors, political agendas, and limited access to the people or resources needed to collect meaningful data. The most important impact this project has had on my ID studies (though I do not plan to pursue evaluation in my career) is that it highlighted factors in design and development that will be examined in great detail in the future. From a creative development perspective, I realize that a good idea must also have a backend value, or else it will be perceive as wasteful.
Having had previous experience with the C2C Advantage program and with Mr. Schappert, I felt I was able to ask better evaluation questions and serve as a leader for project partners Ryan Villar and Lu Chen in discussions with Mr. Schappert about how the program operates.
On the other hand, my previous involvement introduced elements of perceived conflict of interest in the evaluation, which had to be accounted for in the methods of the plan – even though I had no financial interest in the product itself.
