Assessing the impact of media literacy interventions is notoriously difficult, as it is hard to measure the acquisition of skills, particularly with no standard baseline to refer to. But, as increased digital media literacy becomes ever more necessary in the complex online environment, as a tool against disinformation and more, it is crucial that media literacy practitioners are able to effectively monitor the results of their initiatives and measure these against their goals.
Jointly developed by Media Literacy Ireland (MLI), the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) and the Irish EDMO Hub, this webinar explored the importance of evaluation, and offered expert insights into the process of monitoring and evaluation, and provided useful examples of measurement and assessment.
The webinar opened with a recording from Prof. Sonia Livingstone who talked about the importance of measuring the impact of media literacy despite the challenges, and of ensuring that what is measured relates to the ultimate goals of the initiative.
Following Sonia, Kate Morris from Ofcom outlined what we actually mean when we talk about evaluation, why it is important as well as looking at some of the challenges and barriers to evaluating media literacy initiatives.
Following Kate, we were joined by someone who has been walking the talk, so to speak of trying to evaluate the impact of media literacy interventions. Andy Demeulenaere of the Flemish Knowledge Centre for Digital and Media Literacy will demonstrated Mediawijs’ approach to evaluating the impact of their media literacy projects, exploring different evaluation processes and highlighting some of the important lessons learned they have learned so far.
Finally, we had a case-study from Ireland as Vicky O’Rourke outlined the process of evaluation that she undertook for the Mediawise, the Irish primary school media literacy programme from SafeFood.
Attendees also received access to EDMOs learning platform for a limited time before and after the webinar.
