What is Monitoring or Integrative Evaluation

This article discusses approaches for evaluating distance education activities. It comprises a framework for evaluation that is based on widely adopted approaches to educational evaluation and which can be used for evaluating other educational activities as well. The critical components of this framework are threefold: various phases in the evaluation process, the main focus of each phase, and most appropriate strategies for gathering data in each phase. The use of a framework such as this will ensure that the evaluation process is systematic and also thorough. The discussion here extends earlier discussions of the topic by this author in two other publications. These are in a chapter titled “Designing and evaluating instruction for e-learning”, that is published in a book edited by Patricia Rogers “Designing Instruction for Technology-Enhanced Learning” (see Rogers, 2002), and in a chapter titled “Evaluating the impacts of e-learning” in the book “E-learning: A Guidebook of Principles, Procedures and Practices” (see Naidu, 2006).