Strand 2: criteria for describing and assessing training interventions
RIDLs has formulated a draft set of criteria, attached below, to help training practitioners in higher education describe and assess their training and development interventions and resources. These criteria relate to all interventions aimed at developing researchers’ information-handling knowledge, skills and competencies, whether in the form of face-to-face sessions/courses or digital/online resources. They serve two broad purposes:
(i) Helping institutional staff who design and deliver such courses and resources to describe and review them; the aim being to provide a structured and recognized way of presenting such interventions in online resources and demonstrating their value.
(ii) Providing a simple means of assessing courses and resources, for use within or outside the institutions in which the interventions have been compiled; the aim being to assess their suitability and usefulness as transferable resources.
To reflect the two purposes, the document is in two parts. These are complementary, and in both cases, the criteria are articulated around a series of questions addressed directly at practitioners.
It is important that the criteria should be clear and acceptable, and that they should be used with confidence within the HE and research sectors as an aid to the design of training interventions and resources. From September 2012, they are thus being tried in a number of environments, with RIDLs members using their networking capacity to promote selected piloting; they are also being used as a basis for describing the cases of good practice identified under strand 3 of the RIDLs programme. On the basis of this trialling and of perceived need, it is anticipated that the criteria will be refined and adapted further, ready for further dissemination and, we hope, more widespread usage, from the early part of 2013.
If you feel that you would like to try out the criteria within your own institutions, please do not hesitate to do so. And if you would like further information, feel free to contact Stéphane Goldstein, at [email protected] .
Criteria for describing and assessing interventions – provisional version
Last update: 25 September 2012