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Collaboration between actors working across different levels of the German higher education system shows that governance-sensitive evidencing of the effectiveness of investment in teaching structures and learning environments is not an analytical refinement but a practical necessity.
Which teaching innovations actually work, and which don't? Which practices improve learning outcomes, and which might be counterproductive?
Universities need answers to these questions for purposeful investment in and engagement with teaching structures and learning environments. Funding must be justified to the public, and policy makers need to create appropriate regulatory frameworks.
Universities also need answers to these questions to inform change within their institutions and convince different stakeholders. This is why the European Higher Education Area has long advocated for evidence-oriented teaching enhancement. But what does this mean, and how does it work in practice?
First of all, what exactly counts as evidence of enhanced teaching?
The answer depends on who is asking: funders want to demonstrate reach and systemic change, university leaders seek proof of institutional impact, networks need arguments for collective action and individual academics want to know whether their engagement in development work pays off.
Meaningful evidence must address all these needs, making it not only a methodological matter but also one of perspective, which is tied to governance structures.
The governance of learning and teaching unfolds across three levels: the policy framework, cross-institutional networks and individual institutions. Each level places different demands on teaching enhancement and requires structurally different forms of evidence.
These forms may complement each other, but evidence generated at one level does not automatically translate to another. While cross-institutional perspectives prioritise comparability and measurability, individual universities may find more value in the judgements of their own teaching staff and their established practices.
What counts as proof of effectiveness at the policy level may have little relevance or credibility within faculties and classrooms, and vice versa. However, the prevailing discourse tends to assume that there is a single valid form of proof, failing to recognise the different information and accountability needs at each level.
As long as evidence expectations are formulated without differentiation and funding programmes apply standardised theories of change to explain how and why a certain activity would yield outcomes, teaching enhancement initiatives will continue to be systematically measured against outcomes that manifest at a different level to where they actually arise. For instance, system-wide reach may be assessed rather than tracking contributions to changes in individual teaching practice.
What is needed instead is an approach that takes each university governance level and its accountability needs as the reference point and systematically brings together generalisable research findings, context-specific evaluation data and practical experience that respond to their respective needs.
Specifically: funding programmes should define their information needs without prescribing a single theory of change, leaving room for context-appropriate forms of evidence at each level.
Bamber and Stefani (2016) provide a useful understanding of evidencing in this context, describing it as an interpretive process that triangulates local evaluation data, findings from theoretical-empirical research and practical experience as equally valid forms of evidence.
Networks that work across higher education institutions could support the translation work between governance levels, helping to make institutional evidence legible in policy contexts, and vice versa. While within universities, more support is needed to generate qualitative and process-oriented evidence and make it visible as legitimate and methodologically sound.
Since 2020, the German Foundation for Innovation in Higher Education has become one of Europe's largest funding organisations dedicated exclusively to teaching enhancement.
Established jointly by the German federal government and the sixteen states (Länder), the Foundation provides around €150 million annually to support innovative teaching projects and strategic development. Rather than operating at the level of individual institutions alone, it occupies an intermediate position between policy and practice. Its role therefore extends beyond funding projects to strengthening the wider teaching enhancement ecosystem through community building and knowledge transfer.
The Foundation's intermediary position illustrates why evidencing cannot be reduced to measuring project outcomes alone. Besides competitive funding programmes, it facilitates exchange between institutions, develops knowledge infrastructures, organises conferences and thematic networks and promotes the dissemination of successful practices across the higher education sector.
It therefore enables institutional innovation, connects actors across institutions and translates local experiences into knowledge that can inform future policy and practice. These activities generate different kinds of evidence, many of which become visible only over longer periods and across organisational boundaries.
This demonstrates the importance of recognising cross-institutional organisations as actors in higher education. Their contribution lies not only in distributing financial resources but also in connecting governance levels. They translate policy objectives into action while making on the ground experiences visible to policy makers.
Consequently, evaluating their impact requires more than counting funded projects or participants. It also means examining how they foster collaboration, build professional communities, strengthen knowledge exchange and support sustainable organisational learning.
These forms of impact are central to teaching enhancement but are often overlooked by conventional evaluation frameworks. The German example thus illustrates a broader point: governance-sensitive evidencing is not an analytical refinement but a practical necessity for capturing the full range of contributions that teaching enhancement makes across European higher education.
Note: This article is based on an interactive workshop at the 2026 European Learning & Teaching Forum at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon, in February 2026, facilitated by the authors alongside Christiane Jost (RheinMain University of Applied Sciences) and Anne Lequy (Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences).
