The EHE Initiative: programme architecture and evaluation design

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Abstract
Local evaluation was a key element of the evaluation strategy for the EHE initiative. In offering an overview of local evaluations undertaken by the 50 or so HEIs involved in EHE, this paper endeavours to account for why local evaluations have converged around a grounded, dispersed evaluation model focused in the main on curriculum changes at course level. The strategic and integrative qualities of the initiative which posed evaluation questions about institutional capacity to manage the processes of change associated with EHE have generally not been included within the scope of local evaluations, nor have other key facets of the innovation been addressed. The thesis running through this paper is that the programme architecture of EHE both shaped the nature of the innovation as well as contextualised evaluation design. In adopting an evaluation stance in which evaluation was integrated with the innovation process, evaluation itself mirrored the ‘developmental trajectory’ of EHE as an innovation. Evaluation thus cannot be divorced from the political processes associated with the implementation of an externally introduced programme of change. The general lesson to be drawn from the experience of EHE local evaluations is the interdependence between programme characteristics and their evaluation.

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