Harnessing the power of evaluation to build better partnerships

A new evaluation handbook gives us the evidence to understand the value of partnerships – and to use that evidence to inform decision-making.

International partnerships play an important role for universities, from student exchanges to researchers sharing data to collaborative learning programmes. Yet our understanding of how such partnerships perform can be quite limited.

This need for understanding has led to a new publication “Harnessing the power of evaluation to build better international strategic partnerships between universities”.

The handbook is intended to help staff in University international offices, and those involved in international policy and strategy development, to improve the quality of international strategic partnerships through evaluation.

“The EVALUATE project has been a learning journey for all. University-to-university partnerships are extremely diverse and shaped by the parties’ distinct approach to collaboration. This context matters. Therefore, this new evaluation framework is flexible and can be shaped by contextual factors”.

At its core is an evaluation framework, which presents key questions and other prompts to guide the design of evaluations.

About the evaluation framework

The EVALUATE Framework focuses primarily on strategic international partnerships between Higher Education Institutions (HEI). The framework defines these partnerships as formal arrangements between two or more HEIs located in different nation-states.

The Framework primarily consists of questions which are split into three categories

1. The evaluation and its context

2. The central evaluation question

3. The partnership and its context

The EVALUATE Framework doesn’t cover every question that you could ask, it instead shows you the types of questions that you may want to consider, examples of issues to be aware of and possible approaches to evaluation.

This handbook was created by the EVALUATE project – Developing a Framework for Evaluation of International University partnerships. EVALUATE was funded under ERASMUS+ Key Action 2 from 2019 – November 2022. The University of Edinburgh was the project coordinator.

The EVALUATE project consortium

• The University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• University College Dublin, Ireland
• The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
• The University of Helsinki, Finland
• Leiden University, Netherlands
• The University of Sydney, Australia