Evaluating Knowledge Transfer

About the workshop: How can you evaluate the effectiveness of KT? Knowledge transfer or KT is a term that encompasses a number of distinct processes that are aimed at bringing “knowledge to action.” Most knowledge to action cycles include evaluation as a core component. Increasingly, funders are asking grant recipients to engage in KT as a means to sustain, scale or spread their interventions and many organizations exist to support KT in a variety of domains. Several models and frameworks exist to help projects and organizations plan and evaluate KT. This webinar will explore the complexities and challenges of evaluating KT and offer a simple evaluation framework that can be used across a variety of settings and contexts.

By the end of this Webinar, you will be able to:

1. Describe the knowledge processes that fall under the KT umbrella
2. Identify different purposes for evaluating KT
3. List the complexities of evaluating KT
4. Choose tools and frameworks to evaluate KT
5. Recognize how KT was evaluated in three case studies.

Presenter bio: Marla Steinberg has been a professional evaluator for over 25 years. She has a PhD in social psychology and is an adjunct professor at the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia. She has worked as an internal evaluator for the Public Health Agency of Canada and not-for-profit organizations and now works as an external evaluation and KT consultant and educator. Her evaluations have centred on the health, community, leadership, and research sectors. She provides a full range of evaluation services including developing evaluation frameworks and conducting evaluations, as well as training and coaching to build evaluation capacity. She has delivered numerous workshops, in-person courses and developed several online evaluation courses. In addition to her consulting practice, she currently teaches a 13 week introductory online evaluation course as part of a certificate program in Population Data Analysis at the University of Victoria and serves as the inaugural director of the Canadian Evaluation Society’s online learning platform, the e-Institute.

About the MAP Evaluation Series: The MAP Evaluation Series aims to build on our core principles – street-level solutions, policy impact, training and community partnership – to build evaluation capacity. We convene community agencies and researchers around the country interested in learning about different evaluation and developing evaluation skills.

All sessions are facilitated by individuals with academic or applied evaluation expertise, and are available free-of-charge via Zoom.

About MAP: Through big-picture research and street-level solutions, MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions tackles complex urban health issues. With an evolving focus on evidence-based solutions, the need for evaluation expertise is growing. Connected to both a teaching hospital and university, MAP has a longstanding history in training. We partner with individuals in the community, community agencies and all levels of government to study scalable solutions that will have real, long-term, positive health impacts. Visit maphealth.ca, twitter @MAP_Health.

If you'd like to learn about future MAP Evaluation Series workshops, please join our mailing list by writing to alix.freiler @ unityhealth.to.