The participants make a number of interesting points about where Extension program evaluation has been and is headed. Several of my own take-aways from the video influenced my recent presentations at the 2013 AAEA Annual conference and the APLU meeting on Measuring Excellence in Extension. I’ve paraphrased three of those insights below.
==Nancy Franz: Extension should work toward changing the unit of program evaluation analysis from the individual to the system.
==Mary Arnold: Extension is still too often limiting evaluation to private value and isolated efforts. We need to move closer to systems-level evaluation.
==Sarah Baughman: We need to do more program evaluation for program improvement, not only evaluation for accountability.