Developed within its media literacy programme “Making Sense of Media” (MSOM), Ofcom's toolkit was designed as a practical guide to allow all media literacy practitioners, regardless their resources or experience, to build evaluation into their projects.
For the purpose of this toolkit, 'evaluation' shall be understood as an assessement of the impact of a project, and namely the “change at an individual or societal level that can be attributed to an intervention”.
Ofcom's evaluation toolkit is structured around three steps:
For each step, the toolkit provides practical definitions and recommendations, illustrated by a fictional example.
Key messages from the toolkit:
In the Annex of the toolkit, Ofcom also provides for two searchable online libraries: one listing media literacy initiatives and another listing media literacy research.
By nudging media literacy stakeholders towards more impact evaluation, Ofcom also seeks to encourage the sharing of lessons learned and evidence collected by media literacy practitioners.
In this regard, media literacy practitioners are invited to share their evaluation reports with the regulator.