Moving Beyond Standardized Metrics: Rethinking Criteria for Evaluating Educational Innovations

The field of innovation evaluation in engineering education is growing, yet the perspectives of educators and educational support staff are often overlooked. As a result, critical factors such as relevance, context, and long-term value can go unrecognized, limiting both the effectiveness of evaluations and stakeholder engagement. This workshop builds on findings from a Group Concept Mapping (GCM) study conducted at a European university of technology, where engineering educators and support staff collaboratively identified and ranked 104 criteria for evaluating educational innovations. Early findings revealed a strong emphasis on qualitative aspects, such as workload, student well-being, and alignment with stakeholder needs, ranked above concerns such as scalability and regulatory compliance. The workshop has two aims: to broaden the study by involving an international group of participants from diverse professional roles, and to introduce the engineering education community to a more inclusive and stakeholder-informed view of 'quality'. Participants will collaboratively reflect on and further develop the list of evaluation criteria, and group them into conceptual themes. By the end of the session, participant groups will have explored and developed categorizations of evaluation criteria.