The Monitoring Assessment and Learning Tools have been evaluated, iterated, and further developed throughout the Desire project.
The monitoring, assessment, and learning tools consist of:
- The Logbook serves as a base to report and reflect on the activities run by the site(s). The logbook includes:
The “Activity Plan” where the sites at specific moments in time throughout the project listed the activities they were planning to run
The “Activity Record” where the sites reported the activities that actually took place, their outputs, and the related reflections
- The results of the Outcome Mapping Workshops (see below).
- The Outcome Mapping Workshops consist of three specific workshop sessions that took place at the beginning of the experimentation phase, at a mid-term moment, and at the final stage. Nb. more can be added if the project lasts longer than two years. In the Desire project, these sessions were facilitated by researchers from Polimi (The Polytechnic University of Milan) to monitor and assess the process at the sites and project level as well as to support the sites with their reflections. It is recommended to have an expert or project partner facilitate these activities. Take a look at the Outcome mapping template through the link below.
- The Peer-to-Peer learning template is the support tool for the sites to prepare for the Peer-to-peer (P2P) learning sessions. These sessions have been developed to sustain learning by interaction. An innate part of the Desire project was the various peers across sites and project partners to exchange learnings. For smaller projects it is beneficial to identify and reach out to peers in similar projects to share experiences and learnings with. You can draw inspiration from the questions from the Desire P2P sessions linked to below.
Purpose - Why should we use this tool?
The purpose of this small collection of tools is to ensure a learning mechanism and establish a safely facilitated learning environment throughout your project.
Duration - How much time is needed?
All tools are applied throughout the whole project period. For the logbook, you need to decide with your team how much time to spend on it and when. It is important to allocate time.
The Outcome-mapping workshops have had a 2-hour duration for each site in the Desire project, whereas the Peer-to-Peer learning sessions have a 1,5-hour duration where two sites presented their learnings for each session.
The timespan can be adjusted to the size of your project and amount of participants.
Materials and helpful links
You can draw inspiration from the downloadable templates used in the Desire project at the top of the page. Take a look at the PowerPoint templates for the peer-to-peer sessions used in the Desire project, consisting of three themed rounds. You can also download the excel sheet for the activity record that each site used to register and keep track of their activities.
