Planning for Monitoring, Learning, and Evaluation at Small- to Medium-Sized Foundations

This report is based on findings from desktop research and interviews with selected foundations conducted between April and June 2016. It was developed to give the Oak Foundation a sense of how other foundations are tackling monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) questions, and to show a range of options for Oak to consider as it develops its own MEL Plan. This summary of findings was developed for public distribution, anticipating that it may be useful for other donors.Key trends that emerged from the interviews and desktop research included the following:1. Foundations are spending more resources and putting more staff time into evaluation than they did in the past. Staff at smaller foundations tend to spend more time on individual grant evaluations, while staff at larger foundations tend to spend more time on assessments of broad program areas and on learning processes. While many foundations do not have consistent systems for tracking evaluation spending, some are deciding it would be useful to capture that information more methodically.2. Less attention has been put on learning to-date, but recognition of the importance of purposeful learning is growing quickly. Many foundations are hoping to improve upon their learning processes, but finding that it is not easy. It often requires an internal cultural shift and testing a variety of approaches. In contrast, foundations tend to have fairly clear processes and standards for monitoring and evaluation. Foundations that do have explicit learning efforts remain more focused on internal learning rather than communicating and sharing lessons externally. Foundations tend to be more transparent with external audiences about their grant-making processes, goals, and strategies, and less transparent about how they assess performance or their lessons learned. That said, both grantees and foundations are recognizing that sharing more lessons externally would be beneficial.3. Foundations are exploring appropriate and useful ways to evaluate work done through sub-granting organizations. Some are focusing on building the internal monitoring and evaluation capacity of those organizations. It would be useful for donors to coordinate approaches to evaluate work done through sub-granting organizations, which can allow for pooled resources and avoid putting an extra burden on the subgrantor

Towards Efficient Abstractions for Concurrent Consensus

Consensus is an often occurring problem in concurrent and distributed programming. We present a programming language with simple semantics and build-in support for consensus in the form of communicating transactions. We motivate the need for such a construct with a characteristic example of generalized consensus which can be naturally encoded in our language. We then focus on the challenges in achieving an implementation that can efficiently run such programs. We setup an architecture to evaluate different implementation alternatives and use it to experimentally evaluate runtime heuristics. This is the basis for a research project on realistic programming language support for consensus.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, symposium: TFP 201

Sensor Search Techniques for Sensing as a Service Architecture for The Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is part of the Internet of the future and will comprise billions of intelligent communicating "things" or Internet Connected Objects (ICO) which will have sensing, actuating, and data processing capabilities. Each ICO will have one or more embedded sensors that will capture potentially enormous amounts of data. The sensors and related data streams can be clustered physically or virtually, which raises the challenge of searching and selecting the right sensors for a query in an efficient and effective way. This paper proposes a context-aware sensor search, selection and ranking model, called CASSARAM, to address the challenge of efficiently selecting a subset of relevant sensors out of a large set of sensors with similar functionality and capabilities. CASSARAM takes into account user preferences and considers a broad range of sensor characteristics, such as reliability, accuracy, location, battery life, and many more. The paper highlights the importance of sensor search, selection and ranking for the IoT, identifies important characteristics of both sensors and data capture processes, and discusses how semantic and quantitative reasoning can be combined together. This work also addresses challenges such as efficient distributed sensor search and relational-expression based filtering. CASSARAM testing and performance evaluation results are presented and discussed.Comment: IEEE sensors Journal, 2013. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1303.244

Assessing Learning-Centered Leadership: Connections to Research, Professional Standards, and Current Practices

Describes an assessment model designed to evaluate school leaders' performance. Unlike existing tools, this new system will assess both individuals and teams, and focuses specifically on instructional leadership and behaviors that improve learning

Communicating outcomes of students\u27 evaluations of teaching and learning: one-size-fits-all?

Student evaluations of teaching are increasingly used to measure the teaching of individual academics in Australian higher education. The outcomes of these evaluations are variably made available to the individual academics themselves, to university management and to the public. However, communicating evaluation outcomes to each of these audiences assumes a different purpose and necessitates different objectives, foci and methodology. The need for these differences is sometimes forgotten with a &lsquo;one-size-fits-all&rsquo; approach in Australian higher education. This paper examines these differences and discusses some of the issues surrounding the communication of the outcomes of student evaluations of teaching.<br /

A Guide to Evaluating Marine Spatial Plans

Marine spatial plans are being developed in over 40 countries around the world, to distribute human activities in marine areas more sustainably and achieve ecological, social, and economic objectives. Monitoring and evaluation are often considered only after a plan has been developed. This guide will help marine planners and managers, monitor and evaluate the success of marine plans in achieving real results and outcomes. This report emphasizes the importance of early integration of monitoring and evaluation in the planning process, the importance of measurable and specific objectives, clear management actions, relevant indicators and targets, and involvement of stakeholders throughout the planning process.

Building a Strategic Learning and Evaluation System for Your Organization

The current state of evaluation in the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors points to the need for a more strategic approach to evaluation. In this guide, we provide a framework and set of practices that can help organizations be more systematic, coordinated, and intentional about what to evaluate, when, why, with whom, and with what resources