Supporting Innovation in Higher Education: How Higher Education Can Support Innovative Teaching Practices

Educational institutions that want to successfully innovate regarding the education they provide must synchronise organisational growth with educational growth. To support such innovation, a maturity model can help identify successful teaching and learning practices by encouraging experimentation, collaboration and alignment with strategic goals. Although maturity models that support staff in the process of innovating education are valuable, they are scarce. This phenomenological study explored the views of staff from the Centre for Expertise in Learning and Teaching (CELT) on readiness for innovation at the University of Twente (UT). We surveyed staff members who were actively involved in projects or teacher initiatives aimed at educational innovation. The questionnaire consisted of 137 closed-ended multiplechoice questions (e.g. ‘Is teaching support guided by the latest research findings?’) and answers on a five-point scale (‘Not’, ‘Partly’, ‘Largely’, ‘Fully’ and ‘Don’t know’). The survey’s structure was based on that of the maturity model. The questions were divided into five categories of processes: learning (directly affecting pedagogy), development (related to the creation and maintenance of resources), support (related to support and operational management), evaluation (related to evaluation and quality control throughout its lifecycle) and organisation (related to institutional planning and management). After the survey results were analysed, respondents were invited to reflect on its outcomes, share their insights and suggest possible explanations for the results. In this paper, we present the educational support staff’s maturity model results and discuss how these results can influence the effects of teachers’ innovative practices.