Summit Group:

Program Evaluation & Quality Assurance

in Vocational Rehabilitation

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The Summit Group is a community of VR professionals organized around the goal of advancing excellence in program evaluation and quality assurance (QA). Anyone with an interest or expertise is invited to join in.

3rd Annual Summit QA Conference Webinar

Summit Webinar Series

The Summit Group is sponsoring a series of 8 webinars. Past webinars are archived below. New presentations will be announced as they are scheduled. The following information is important for successfully accessing the live webinar events:

• To participate in the webinars, go to the link associated with the current webinar (below). Prior to the event, you will find a description of the topic and speaker, dates, and time. On the day of the webinar you will find a link to the event. At the scheduled time, the link will let you into the webinar.
• You need to be running the latest version of Java to attend the webinars. You can have your computer checked and find updates here: http://www.elluminate.com/support/index.jsp
• When you enter the webinar, You need to accept the Java download. It's absolutely safe.
• Most communication will be done using the chat function. If you must speak, you need to have a headset with a unidirectional microphone to avoid creating feedback.
  
• Captioning is available within the program.
  

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Satisfaction Surveys

Here is the listing for surveys associated with your webinars.

Summit QA Resources

The following materials have been collected from Program Evaluation & QA efforts from programs around the nation. They are organized according to topic.

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Summit Conference Proceedings and Materials

A collection of the proceedings of the conferences thus far.

Needs Assessment Survey

SUMMIT READING GROUPS

Welcome Group Members! My name is Darlene Groomes and I am very pleased to facilitate the Reading Groups. I hope that we can have a truly interactive process and experience that will strengthen our participation in the national Summit Group for Program Evaluation and Quality Assurance.

All activities will occur at this site. Thank you to Dr. Michael Millington for hosting the reading groups through the NCRTM website. As we decide to teleconference from time to time, we need to thank Dr. Scott Sabella at The University of Northern Colorado for hosting and monitoring those calls.

The reading groups are comprised of interested individuals who want to read an assigned book and exchange personal and professional input, feedback, and learning content.

The primary purpose of the Reading Group is to offer information on the process behind program evaluation, quality assurance, and continuous improvement, while also providing you with an opportunity to build your professional library and reference base. A secondary purpose is to expose group members to the latest technologies that allow group processes to unfold in unique ways. With that, we may experience a few glitches from time to time, so a third purpose of the reading groups may be to test our levels of patience?

There will be a series of Reading Groups, each one lasting about 5 months. During the five month time frame, we will read the assigned book, join in Forum Discussions, chat sessions, and teleconferences to exchange our thoughts and share our reactions to the book content. We will focus the readings to our daily professional lives, although I am certain our personal lives may be affected, as well.

The first group is reading Patton's book entitled: Utilization-Focused Evaluation (2008, Fourth Edition). This is a large, informative book of 667 pages. Taken from the back cover, this book will "show readers how to conduct program evaluations that yield useful results...Patton offers readers a clear understanding of how to improve program evaluation...including tips ranging from identifying primary users of an evaluation to how to present one's findings."

Let’s get started!