Impact Evaluation for Equity workshop

This morning I attended the Impact Evaluation for Equity workshop for Canberra universities, hosted at the Australian National University. This was organized by the Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success (ACSES). Dr Patricia Vermillion Peirce (ACSES Trials Lead) provided enthusiastic and knowledgeable will facilitation. The idea is to help with evaluation of equity practices at universities. Governments and universities spend a lot of time and money providing programs to disadvantaged groups of students, but do these programs actually work and could they be done better? This is the aim of evaluation. 

As a student of education, I was required to study evaluation techniques, but Patricia covered many more approaches I was not familiar with. One aspect which troubles me with equity issues is where universities are not implementing good teaching practices and need to make up for this with programs for students who are discriminated against as a result. If universites used the type of online, competency based, flexible, nested, RPLed and other techniques which are routine in vocational institutions, then much of the equity programs would not be required. 

In some cases universities simply need to implement what is required by law. As an example it if very simple for universities to provided closed captions on video material. As a result the law requires universities to do this. However, so cliam (falsely) that students have to request this.