Developing and Piloting an Approach to Evaluate Educational Innovation at Course Level

Evaluation of educational innovation at the course level is dominated by frameworks that are linear, built on simple models, lack grounding in theory, and are generally not flexible enough to provide actionable recommendations for improvements. Moreover, the guidelines provided by existing literature are difficult to transfer to other contexts as most of these are aimed at specific innovations only. Therefore, there is a need for a new approach that is flexible enough to enable adaptation to different contexts, and that draws on the strengths of existing evaluation traditions. This paper forms a starting point for a larger research initiative for developing a comprehensive innovation evaluation framework. The context of the paper is a project based within the four universities of technology in The Netherlands (4TU) dedicated to strengthening collaboration in engineering education and research needed to take on global societal problems. The potential reach of our framework has implications for the wider field. This paper describes the results of an exploratory literature review to draw on the strengths of various evaluation theories to develop a new approach to evaluating educational innovation in courses. Value, Methods, and Use are the main components identified for this approach. Secondly, we developed a workshop to pilot this approach. Lastly, the workshop was presented to educational researchers, engineering educators, and educational advisors. We share lessons learned from the workshop and conclude with descriptions of future research to refine the framework to prepare its application in real innovation initiatives.