Evaluation for Arts, Culture, and Heritage: Principles and Practice (FutureLearn)

Learn with researchers and industry leaders in the cultural sector

The only way to understand and capture the impact of cultural activities, projects, and programmes is through evaluation. That makes evaluation skills vital for arts, culture, and heritage professionals.

On this two-week course from the Centre for Cultural Value at the University of Leeds, you’ll examine the vital role of evaluation in the culture sector. Building on insights from interviews with researchers and industry leaders, you’ll learn how to design, implement, and communicate an evaluation plan.

Understand the role of evaluation in the cultural sector

You’ll start the course by reviewing the definitions and principles of evaluation. You’ll ask why evaluation matters in the context of culture, and discuss your own experience and views on the issue.

You’ll also gain an introduction to some commonly used evaluation frameworks, considering how these might be applied in your own setting and work.

Learn how to put an evaluation plan into practice

Once you’ve understood the key principles and challenges of evaluating cultural activity, you’ll start learning how to put plans into practice. You’ll look at a range of examples and case studies showing evaluation in action in the cultural sector.

You’ll discover a variety of methods, models, frameworks and processes that work together to produce robust, beneficial, and credible evaluation.

By the end of the course, you’ll have developed your own detailed evaluation plan that you can take home and implement in your own project or organisation.

Syllabus

Week 1: Evaluation in the cultural sector

Week 2: Putting evaluation into practice

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to...

- Summarise the role evaluation plays in the cultural sector.

- Investigate effective evaluation approaches in the cultural sector and relevant methods to deliver these.

- Reflect on challenges and practicalities of delivering evaluation.

- Develop a plan to communicate evaluation findings for different purposes and audiences.

- Identify ways evaluation can become a learning experience at organisational or programme level.

Who is the course for?

This course is designed for professionals, practitioners, and managers in the arts, culture, and heritage who use evaluation in their work for decision-making, strategy, fundraising, and stakeholder relationship management. This might include independent, freelance, or research agency evaluators, in-house organisation evaluators, project managers and general managers of cultural organisations, artists and practitioners.

This course will also be useful for consultants, freelance artists, funders, policymakers, and board members in arts, culture, and heritage settings, as well as students of arts and cultural management or cultural policy.