Naar een systematiek van monitoring van educatieactiviteiten in nationale parken: Meten van het beleven van en het meedoen in de natuur

The National Parks (NP) in the Netherlands have drawn up a joint education strategy, with goals regarding the intended quality of the educational activities in the national parks and their supervisors or implementers, and about the intended effects of these activities. Now that this strategy is in place, there is a need for a monitoring system to obtain an overview of all educational activities carried out in a national park, with the aim of determining whether they fit with the Magical Moments education strategy. This requires insight into how data about educational activities can be collected by different providers (forest rangers, volunteers, hosts, etc.). The research has led to the conclusion that more and better cooperation is needed before a clear monitoring system can be implemented. Six recommendations have been drawn up for this purpose. 1. Provide preferably one central reception centre in each park, where visitors can go. 2. Work with a central booking for educational activities per park, and divide the requests according to required expertise/experience, with an additional distribution key for general questions. 3. Develop a centrally available app for instant feedback on received education, which works with QR codes that can also be activated in the park itself. This could be a general national parks app, where a feedback function is built in on the forms of education. 4. Record (possibly via the app) information about the visitor during the booking process, such as age, gender, place of residence, whether to repeat a visit. 5. Use a system for the deployment of volunteers affiliated with different organizations, in which the employability, expertise and flexibility of organizational ties are used to staff the voluntary education. 6. Work with a clear commissioning structure when it comes to the implementation of education programs including monitoring. For example, give each national park the role of client of the educational activities, and provide them with a budget to fulfil that role (no extra money, but different management of existing funding flows). The recommendations come at a time when National Parks are drawing up their education strategies. A lot needs to be done to put the ambitions of Magical Moments into practice and to set up good monitoring. The recommendations mainly reflect signals from practice, such as the perspective on monitoring (should not be a goal in itself), lack of cooperation and lack of time. In addition, they are derived from literature and respond to the ambitions of Magical Moments. They can be called cautious, because much of the work is done by volunteers and they should not end up in a culture of accountability. Despite major differences between the parks, some recommendations are still aimed at creating unity in monitoring. This seems possible with the use of technology