Five M&E Practices to Measure and Boost the Impact of Online Education Programs

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The Business and Culture program connects undergraduate students in Egypt, Lebanon, Libya and the U.S. (at the University of Michigan), enabling them to develop connections and critical international business competencies through synchronous virtual sessions and a cross-cultural team-based final project. Soliya, an international non-profit and pioneering virtual exchange provider, takes a similar approach. Combining the power of interactive technology with the science of dialogue, its Connect Program fosters interdisciplinary cross-cultural exchanges and provides critical thinking, communication and digital media literacy skills to post-secondary students in over 200 colleges and universities in 35 countries in North America, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, and South and Southeast Asia. (Both programs are supported by the Stevens Initiative, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, with funding provided by the U.S. Government, and is administered by the Aspen Institute.)

To support organizations and programs that are employing virtual exchange, we have compiled the following five key monitoring and evaluation (M&E) insights. Based on WDI and Soliya’s experience, these go beyond commonly used training evaluation frameworks such as the Kirkpatrick Four Levels and training effectiveness questions, and can be applied to a korea whatsapp number data variety of e-learning programs.



Insight 1: Design your M&E plan to measure impact and enable adaptive management.
WDI’s performance measurement team consciously designs M&E strategies to measure impact and support efforts to strengthen programs in real-time. In other words, its M&E plan enables adaptive management — a term USAID defines as “an intentional approach to making decisions and adjustments in response to new information and changes in context.” For example, students in the first semester of the Business and Culture program shared a request for more engagement with their group members and peers. Hence, in the following semester, WDI placed students in their cross-cultural project groups at the start of the semester instead of toward the middle, when the final project was assigned. Additionally, the program used technology solutions like Padlet and Zoom breakout rooms to facilitate interactions outside their project groups. (WDI published a video with instructions to design an M&E strategy that measures impact and enables adaptive management here.)