How it began

Programs promoting new technologies and e-learning in the domain of universitary education are frequently implemented through a large number of individual, very different projects. This raises the question of how the success of the overall program can be assessed without neglecting the diversity of the individual projects.

This was precisely the problem we faced during the evaluation of the ETH-internal programs ETH World and Fund filep. It was clear that getting a general idea about the success of the program as a whole was difficult just by studying the evaluation reports of the individual projects. This was the background of the idea of developing a handbook of methods and instruments for cross-project evaluation. The handbook is intended to support thos responsible for programs, assessors and centre of excellence staff in evaluating the all projects at their university or within a program.

A second reason for the development of this handbook was the fact that project staff are usually required to evaluate their project. They often have to present the evaluation concept as early as the project application stage. In order to support project staff in these tasks, the website also includes information and instruments for evaluation at a  project level.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the ETH Zurich, the Swiss Virtual Campus Program (Federal Secretary for Education and Research) and the Federal Office of Vocational Education and Technology for their support of this project. We would also like to extend our warm thanks to the ELBA Team at the Network for Educational Technology for their support with the Wiki-Web!