Evaluating the impact of media literacy initiatives

Programme Description

The European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) is pleased to announce the launch of a new training module on “Evaluating the impact of media literacy initiatives”.

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. The lack of established criteria and methods for assessing projects, along with perceived challenges, mean that many don’t even attempt evaluation. Of the 68 media and information literacy projects analysed by the Council of Europe’s Committee of experts on quality journalism in the digital age, one third did not undergo any form of evaluation or assessment.

LSE/Ofcom’s Rapid evidence assessment on online misinformation and media literacy noted the difficulty of assessing the effectiveness of current interventions to tackle misinformation: “In particular, efforts to educate audiences and change the ways they engage with information are fragmented across educational contexts, platform-specific initiatives, media-related initiatives and fact-checking services. As a result, their impact on audience knowledge, attitudes and behaviour towards misinformation is unclear.”

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. In the absence of a widely agreed way to measure impact, this training session will offer a deep dive into each step of the process of monitoring and evaluation, and provide useful examples of measurement and assessment.

To participate please apply here by 8 March at 23:59 CET.

This edition of the Evaluating the impact of media literacy initiatives training is limited to 40 participants. Further editions of this module will be considered in case of high interest. The organizers will be responsible for selecting the participants to the training. Participants will be selected with an effort made to ensure a balanced representation across gender, nationality, and institutional lines.

This training is part of a series of residential and online training modules organized by EDMO.

For more information, visit edmo.eu/trainings.