Measuring value and impact for educational developers

Principal investigator: Professor Susannah Quinsee

This project is supported by the Heads of Educational Development Group (HEDG) and is a collaboration between City, University of London, Brunel University London, Sheffield Hallam University and Southampton Solent University.

It is a response to emerging trends and patterns that seek to measure aspects of academic work and the student experience, and the increasing need for educational development units to demonstrate value for money and evidence of impact. Such approaches are frequently metric based and rarely meaningfully capture the richness and transformational nature of Educational Development work.

Measuring Value and Impact for Educational Developers aims to build on existing scholarship and literature in the field which seeks to measure the impact of Educational Development and, through a grounded theory approach, to explore how current practice might be developed to more meaningfully report on the work that we do.

Our methodological approach has been to conduct an in-depth survey which explored how the impact of Educational Development work is currently defined and measured. We then followed the survey with a series of interviews and focus groups.

Using the findings of this empirical research, we have developed a conceptual framework informed by scholarly approaches. The framework utilises both quantitative and qualitative approaches to evidence gathering, demonstrating value, and the evaluation of impact. We are currently piloting an online version of the framework with educational developers and plan to make the site available to the community in 2022.