About this site
Measuring, monitoring and managing your program's performance is becoming more important. Although measuring performance of an organisation or program is complex, knowledge is the first step to improvement.

This website has been developed to assist you and your alternative learning choices program(s) understand your program's wellbeing (its strengths and weaknesses) by reporting:
• How healthy your program is and what makes a program healthy
• Areas that are tracking well or need improvement
• How your program rates against the average of all programs
• Useful links and contacts for continuous improvement - click here for Links and Resources

OSAT
This free online tool allows you to easily monitor, measure and manage your program's health based on your responses, from 0-5, against a number of key indicators grouped into Program Design, Organisational Health and Measurables. You can use the responses to refer to them in planning and management meetings, support proposals for funding or for marketing purposes.

DSF and practitioners who attended the 2004 Learning Choices Expo have developed OSAT to meet the expressed need of programs to be able to better assess their performance. It was successfully launched at the 2006 Learning Choices Expo.

It's easy to use, provides useful reports and links to resources and can track the performance of your program over time. Anyone can assess your program but to get a more insightful assessment we suggest assessing with a key colleague or board member.


How does it work?
Register: This allows you to create your own account so you can use the tool securely at any time to track your program performance.

Rate your Responses: Rate responses from 0-5 for a series of indicators grouped into Program Design, Organisational Health and Measurables.

Generate your reports: You can choose to track your performance within a 12 month period, quarterly or whenever suits your program best. Your can track your program's performance through:

After you generate your reports you should have a better understanding of the key strrengths and waknesses and overall wellbeing of your program. This allows you to plan your program development and improvement in coordinated and strategic way as you can produce your reports any time. The reports become a toolkit to assist your program's design for improvement and advancement:

Management Tool: Comprehensive tool to measure and benchmark performance against timelines and specified goals and outcomes.

Strategic Planning: Highlights strengths and weaknesses and therefore where to allocate time, staff, resources etc.

Financial Planning: OSAT provides consistency in measurement and assessment across all programs, at no cost, and shows where funding is best allocated over time.

Communication Tool: encourages program participants (clients, staff, board members, employers etc) to understand and contribute to better performance. Allows discussion to take place using common language with common indicators.

Networking: Chance to be part of an online community, which discusses and advances common framework, language and measurements. Provides an opportunity to exchange ideas, tips and hints and resources online as an equal.

Last words
OSAT is provided by DSF on the internet via the Learning Choices community and is designed wholly for self assessment by alternative learning choices programs. DSF will not monitor, collect or retain programs’ assessment results; anonymity of program reports is assured. However, all new users are asked to register online prior to commencing the self-assessment so we can survey you in the future to seek comment on possible improvements.


Thanks to the team of stakeholders who attended Learning Choices 2004 and helped develop OSAT.